Michael Roebuck's Blog: Search Engine Strategies

Day 2 at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose has been a rather interesting one. I just returned from the Google Dance and it's late. Here is a very brief summary of the day; The highlight was a live demonstration of Yahoo Search Marketing's new Ad Platform scheduled for release in Q4. The "Googling of Yahoo" as one attendee coined it.

The new PPC ad platform means ads will no longer be positioned by money alone. It will now include quality. We've known about these changes for some time now but today was the first day we got to see it work. Some other changes include the ability to run and test multiple creatives (AB Split), run in geographic regions, etc. Much like Google. Two features I liked were the ability for Yahoo to spider your site and suggest keywords based upon your own site and the ability to not only place a maximum budget on your entire account but place a budget on campaigns as well. The keyword suggestions will be great for beginners and the budget will prevent total account shut-down should one of your campaigns become too expensive. A few pictures of screen shots of the new ad platform are below. Sorry, they are very blurry. Please don't ask me to fully explain each picture.

Another seminar included one about press releases. Did you know that 50 million americans read news on the Internet daily? 40% of searches on the Internet are for news. Press releases have surpassed trade publications as top news sources and Yahoo news is much more popular than Google news. In short, continue writing your press releases and ensure they are optimized for correct key phrases. (That's key phrases as told by Yahoo as they are the most popular... hint-hint)

Lastly, the Google Dance was a success as always. Good food, Good drinks, Good friends and Good Fun. Here are some random pictures from the show followed by the Google Dance. Have fun and we'll see what tomorrow brings. Two more days of this crazy excitement!

Matt Cutts from Google showing his dance moves at the mention of the upcoming Google Dance. This was a duplicate content panel that got rather lively at the mentioning of automatic word replacement to throw off the search engines from detecting duplicate content.

Co-Worker, Karl Ribas and Lori Weiman from Keyword Max: One of our PPC tracking partners.

And Now....
The Google Dance

Karl, Jessica and myself performing "What I Like About You" live at the Google Dance. As a special, "You saw it here first" treat, I've obtained the rights from Karl and Jessica to post some of this live performance. I've converted it to a 20MB file in MP4 format and you should be able to save it direct to your computer and then play. Enjoy! To download the video, Right Click on the link; Live from the GooglePlex: Michael, Karl and Jessica and then choose, "Save Target As." Save the file and double click the file once downloaded to your computer. (No autographs please, but we are booking for next season)