The day started with a sponsored breakfast by Compete.com with a presentation by Jeremy Crane on Compete functionality.
I came a bit late so I did not catch the entire presentation, but one interesting tidbit that I caught concerned the reporting of an Attention metric. What percent of users are visiting a particular site compared to others over time. This is particularly interesting considering sites that are engaged in significant PR and buzz generation.
Compete is also offering search marketing related competitive intelligence reporting similar to Keyword Discovery CI and basic levels of Hitwise. Compete is looking for beta testers also.
MC, I mean Emcee Gord Hotchkiss kicked things off with his thoughts about search as a connector.
Next up was the Keynote with Esther Dyson of Edventure Holdings and David Vise of Breaking Views, who decided to channel the spirit of Bill Gates for his interview.
The keynote was followed by “The Future of Search Innovation” with Ron Belanger of Yahoo, Paul Martino of Aggregate Knowledge, Ravi Raj of Kosmix and Chase Norlin of Pixsy filling in for Dr. Barney Pell of Powerset.
The first breakout session was Video Search Optimization, which wasn’t so much about video SEO as it was about the various speakers. Thank you to Matt the moderator and Dan from cars.com for providing particular SEO related insight into promoting videos online.
The day winded up with a live site review with Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro and Patrick Garrett who I could really make fun of because of his search navigating performance, but I won’t, from Outrider giving advice to the likes of Lexis Nexus, Sylvan Learning and an RV site.
With site reviews, the consistent recommendation dealt with adding relevant content. In addition, keyword research and the creation of content that would be attractive for other web sites to make reference and link to. Gord Hotchkiss did a great job of bringing usability and analytics into the recommendations.
I will be posting more detailed entries about the sessions later today. More photos at Flickr.
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