The second official day of Search Engine Strategies (SES) is now underway and some interesting things have happened so far. Yesterday we had the privilege of hearing Clay Shirky speak on Social Media and its effects on world affairs. Clay touched on the effects of social media’s consumer impact and even sported the now infamous “3 wolf moon t-shirt.”
The trade show was open so I got a few minutes to chat with the folks working on Bing’s up-and-coming mobile search platform as well as WYS from Google who is known online as “that guy who does the Google webmaster videos with Matt Cutts.” In the afternoon I got to sit in on a panel that included 3 of the top 5 people involved in SEO in the world namely Bruce Clay, Michael Gray, and Aaron Wall. Then in the evening, WebmasterRadio.fm put on their Search Bash after party where the industry’s movers and shakers were able to well…move and shake together.
The Latest and Greatest
The most useful session for me so far has to be the panel on SEO tools I got to attend where the top industry experts shared what they are using for deploying, monitoring and maintaining their own personal search campaigns. Aaron Wall’s set of tools is continuing to be one of the most impressive set of SEO resources that are currently available as a side note at one point Bruce Clay admitted that he uses some of Aaron’s tools quite frequently. This was amusing since both parties are directly in competition with one another in some areas. Michael Gray’s presentation of tools was more diverse and gave a lot of good advice on avoiding some of the pitfalls that more intermediate to advanced SEO’s fall into.
The Future of SEO
One thing that everyone seems to be emphasizing is that the saying that “SEO is dead” could not be further from the truth. The obvious trend is that the search landscape is definitely changing and will continue to change drastically in the next couple years. The thing to remember is that search engines will always rank sites and that as long as that is happening there will be a need for SEO’s to get your site to the top of those rankings. The industry leaders will simply be the ones who optimize their clients for these new mediums first.
my bf has a “3 wolf howling at the moon” shirt, and he’s a cool guy.
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