Next week I’m going to the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. I’m on the Advanced Search Term Research Tools panel and will be speaking on using site search for keyword research. The basic idea is that when you are sitting around trying to work out which search terms to use for your search engine marketing, you should be looking at what people are typing into your own search box. This lets you see the language of your existing users. You can see the relative popularity of the search terms and all the variations that people use. Of course, as part of our site search service we provide extensive reporting to make it easy to do this research.

It’s been interesting to see this conference evolve over the years. I went to the first SES in San Francisco in 1999 (I think). At the time I was working for Snap.com and we had just released the Live Directory. The conference was much smaller. Sergey Brin was one of several people on the “meet the crawlers” panel. In 1999 a random person you sat next to would most likely be running an adult site (they’re always ahead of the pack when it comes to new media). Now the conference is huge, the Google guys are famous and you’re more likely to be sitting next to someone from a Fortune 500 company. There’s even a list of SES parties.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.