Michael Roebuck's Blog

Today is my first day back after attending Search Engine Strategies in Chicago. It's been a busy day, as usual after being away for several days. The show was a success and I came back with several new tips and tricks to try with Yahoo! Stores in order to increase both Search Engine Placement as well as Conversions. I was accompanied by Karl Ribas and on Tuesday we were graced with the presence of Kelly and Jessica. Kelly is one of our Yahoo! Store RTML designers and Jessica performs SEO and PPC duties.

Other Yahoo Developer friends Rob Snell as well as Dave and Sally Burke were both present and we swapped a few stories. Rob was a speaker at a conversion seminar and we all cheered him on. In fact he reviewed one of my sites during the session and offered some good tips. Rob did state a couple times about how a site increased sales by 20% by including a spokesmodel to endorse and give tips. If you don't have a spokemodel, time to get one! I'm available for anyone needing one.






Above, Rob is talking with Lori Blackwell whose brother sells decks. Very interesting lady, story and web site.

Some of you have already noticed I didn't cover the show every day like I did in August. I apologize for that. This week was busy and I didn't have the time to sit and transcribe notes. A good blog to check out for daily notes is my good friend and co-worker Karl Ribas. He gives a great day by day summary of his show activities.

Due to all the snow we received here on Friday and the inability to come to work, it set me back a few days and I was actually a day late at going to the show. But that didn't stop me from getting some good data. I primarily wanted to meet with various vendors and see what they could offer us. I had discussions with several tracking vendors as well as a few publishing vendors. I feel we are closer to a great tracking solution and I even met with a usability expert and long time friend of mine with the goal of working closely with him to allow me the ability to offer great usability advice for Yahoo! Store clients. Keep watch for that service to appear. If anyone has immediate needs for usability analysis, let me know.

I sat with Yahoo Search and had a great presentation on there new PPC model coming out. Code named, "Panama," this will enable Yahoo to be more like Google in the PPC market. No longer will you bid strictly for position, but various other factors will determine your position. Such as landing page quality, ad popularity and of course money.

Lori Weiman from Keyword Max talked a little about Click Fraud. She was included with Jessie Stricchiola from Alchemist Media and Shuman Ghosemajunder from Google who was pummeled with a direct hit from Jessie about why Google changed click charge policy almost immediately after a lawsuit. As you can see from the below picture, Jessie can barely keep from laughing as Shuman defends Google.

Another big story was WebmasterRadio. They read, "WebmasterRadio.FM investigative journalist Jim Hedger hosts an exclusive WebmasterRadio.FM series on the implications of click fraud on the industry and on national and global security." The story further reads, "Mr. Briggs noted the use of click fraud by criminal and terrorist organizations. Our investigation has found several incidents of this type of activity. We have also found evidence of bot-nets used to facilitate click fraud, primarily against Google advertisers." In short, they claim that terrorists are using Google Adsense Fraud to fund themselves. I highly recommend you listen. The link is: http://www.webmasterradio.fm/breakingstory.php Below are some pictures from an announcement.

Well, that's about it for now. Again, be sure to check out Karl Ribas' blog for daily attributes.

Anyone interested in more pictures from the show, I have uploaded several pictures to my new work Flickr account. I've been using a Flickr account for personal pictures and decided to start using it for work as well. You can view the pictures by clicking this link:

Until Next Time....

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