Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Buzz Words

SEO, Don’t You Know

March 17th, 2008 · No Comments

Last week a couple of us went to the eTourism Summit in Philadelphia. It was an interesting lecture, a “best of” series featuring ten of the top rated presenters from the very popular 2-day Summit recently held in San Francisco. We found the group that turned out for the day of presentations to be quite diverse, we heard from and spoke to representatives from Google, SeaWorld, Constant Contact and Sears Tower Skydeck, to name a few.

I had a bit of an agenda going into the day. Based on the information that we received prior to the event I had a good idea of what we would be covering during the different presentations, however one thing I did not expect was the overwhelming concentration on Search Engine Optimization. I guess my expectation was that I was going to get some secret tips and tricks on how to market online, specifically in the e-tourism field. About five minutes into the first presentation the buzz words started… keywords, backlinking, keyword density, web analytics, search marketing, SEO. Aaaaahhhh, now your talking! Seach buzz terms, a familiar place for me considering I’ve been working with these technologies for almost 5 years now… however, not the case for most surrounding us.

For the next couple of hours, as the presentations unfolded and question after question came up regarding the “Hows” and “Whens” and “Whys” of optimization, it was clear that SEO and web marketing in general is not a completely understood topic. At least that is the assumption I can make based on this audience sample :-). Point is that everyone had heard of SEO, and that it’s “the next thing”, but they really didn’t have a grasp on what you could do to achieve those kinds of results with their own web sites.

My slight disappointment that I wasn’t going to be learning anything terribly new from the presenters was quickly squashed by the fact that I was going to learn a whole lot more from the audience on this day. I can certainly take a lot from all of the questions that were asked. This interesting perspective certainly helps our team understand and critically analyze what people on the other end of the search bar are thinking.

While I ponder that you can ponder this, a list of all the presentations we saw at last week’s event: