Pictures from 2005 SES Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York

I would like this seoblog to be a window into the people and trends driving the search engine marketing industry. What better way to start that mission than by showing you, with pictures some of the great people in this industry. It would take all week to ID everyone in these pictures but I'll try to put names to faces as best I can. This page will be a bit of a work in progress for the next few days.

My original idea to do something like this came back in 2003 when I attended the WebmasterWorld Search Engine Marketing at PubConference IV in Boston. Well time flies, and now still buzzing from 2005 SES in NY City is as good a time as ever to start my foray into the blogosphere.

SES Conference Day 1

The conference started on a cold NY morning. Here's a shot from 51st and 7th Ave. Looking up towards Times Square.



The most amazing thing about the SES conferences is how they cram so much information and into four days. Take a look at the conference schedule below and you will see that there's more to search engine marketing than just meta tags and keywords. Day 1 and Day 2 had four simultaneous tracks and Day 3 and Day 4 had five simultaneous tracks. Here's a scan of the schedule for Day 1 so you can see what I mean.



As you can see by the circles on the paper above, I was able to attend 3 sessions before lunch. The first session titled "What Makes a Professional SEM?" sounded interesting to me. (Just so you know, I'm not going to do a play-by-play for every session that I attend but in retrospect, this one turned out to be one of my favorites from Day 1).

Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink moderated the session. Representing "The Client" was Dan Perry, Senior Manager, Web Traffic at Career Education Corporation. Dan is responsible for just over 100 websites, and 9 SEO vendors so what he had to say carried a lot of weight with me. To summarize, Dan said, “If I call you, you’re half way there.” I’m looking for a vendor that represents himself or herself in a professional way because sooner or later there’s going to be a teleconference with my boss. If we get on that call and your kids and dogs are barking in the background that’s going to reflect poorly on both of us.” Being a professional Search engine marketer comes down to consistent accountability. Answer your phone like a professional. Do what you say you’re going to do. Return calls and deliver proposals when you say you’re going to.

Jessie Stricchiola, Founder of Alchemist Media represented “The SEO Vendor”. One of Jessie’s key points was that professional search engine marketers are there to analyze and solve problems. We all know that getting marketing on board is the easy part. It’s our job to find a way to successfully work with the internal web team. One way she suggested to do that was to educate the hell out of the client in the proposal stage and outline what you will, might or won't do to the site, and the factors that are out of your control. Another good comment was to get the client to sign off on some sort of “our expectations agreement” that says respective departments will be willing to work with us to implement the various website upgrades.



After lunch, the snow started flying but that did not keep John Haney, Chief Technology Officer at BeyondROI from catching some fresh air in his polo shirt.



Back inside. Much warmer. I settled down for the Selecting the Right SEM Firm for Large Marketers. Gary Stein, Senior Analyst at JupiterResearch moderated this session. I really enjoyed this session because Emily Schubert, Director of Search Marketing & Merchandising at Travelocity provided some new insights into how a very large e-commerce enterprise successfully works with her SEM vendors. Emily pointed out that it’s important for search engine marketing firms to understand that even big companies like Travelocity have lean marketing departments. When she chooses an SEM it’s not about the project, it’s more about the relationship because with a large e-commerce play like Travelocity, you’re never done.

A nice thing about this conference is that we were never too far from an internet access terminal. Here's our own Olga Krivchenko, Backbone Media's Chief Data Analyst and Algorithm Developer catching up on some email.

This is Shelby Garlock from a company called Chemidex Cybrary, a vertical search engine for chemists and formulators. She was attending the conference to learn more about SEM so she could be better equipped to assist her new site development team in increasing traffic to their website. I called her after the show to ask her what she thought about the conference. She said "The conference was great I learned a lot, but I was also impressed with the networking opportunities. I learned just as much by talking with people outside the conference rooms. I did not expect to meet so many great people." She also said she was not overly impressed with booths. Mostly that was due to the lack of technical knowledge of the booth attendees and ability to answer questions.

Moderator: Gary Stein, Panelists: Jonathan Carson of Buzzmetrics, Mark Fletcher of BlogLines, Mike Nazzar of Intellieek and Steve Rubel of KooperKatz. I’m planning to do some more on this session.

Steve Rubel of CooperKatz

SEMPO Meeting

Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs models her smart looking silk scarf.

From left to right: Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR, and Aaron Linde, David McInnis, and Mick Jolly of PR Web.

Here’s the godfather of optimized public relations, Greg Jarboe. Greg has really advanced awareness of online Public Relations and SEO with his impressive case studies and entertaining presentations. I’m proud to say that Greg started combining his PR experience with SEO when he was VP and CMO at Backbone in 2002 and 2003. Greg meet David McInnis at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose in August 2003. In March 2004, they formed a strategic partnership that combined SEO-PR's search engine promotion services with PR Web's press release distribution services. In August 2004, Backbone Media became one of SEO-PR and PR Web's first search engine promotion partners. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.




Let the games begin. SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) outgoing President Barbara Coll (WebMama) throws in the hat to start off the traditional after hours meeting. As a founding member of SEMPO, I’m happy to see that this organization is making progress and moving ahead with its bold mission to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide. Barbara deserves a lot of credit for getting this organization off the ground and enlisting some of the industry’s best personalities to put their weight behind advancing the SEMPO cause. I believe that we are all benefiting from her work and the work of the other SEMPO contributors.

Here’s the new SEMPO Board of Directors. (Not in pictured here but there in spirit) Dana Todd from SiteLab, Ron Belanger from Carat Interactive and Gordon Hotchkiss from Enquiro (left to right) John Sanchez from Zunch, Dave Williams from 360i, Julienne Thompson from Advertising.com, Barbara Coll from Web Mamma, Jeff Pruitt from Icrossing, Mauro Lupi from Ad Maiora Spa, Koichiro Fukasawa from Wasabi Communications, Kevin Lee from DidIt, Jessie Stricchiola from Alchemist Media, Chris Churchill from Fathom Online

SES After Hours Day 1

Some of the Backbone Media search engine marketing team out for dinner at Rosie OGrady's. Olga, Stephen and Francis.

Well after dinner I thought we'd check out the Hilton lounge where I certainly found a bunch of the SEO glitterati. There’s the big guy, Bruce Clay in the far left. Bruce and I had a nice conversation about the pros and cons of mod rewrite for a site built on the Oracle Portal CMS. On the right in the red shirt is Brad Solomon and to his right is Dave Warmuz from Treillian

I sat down for a nice chat with Matt Williams from Prominent Placement and Dale Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing.

Here I am again (Stephen Turcotte). Thanks for taking this picture Matt.

(left) Aaron Wall, Author of The SEO Book. I like the Firefox t-shirt.

Here’s Bradley Snyder and some of the nice folks at Outrider.

Chad Darling, Andy Powell, Andrew Way, Andrew and Jeffrey Cusson from Commission Junction.

Here's Barbara Coll again. Did you know she actually has four clones walking around at every SES conference.

From Right to left, Jim Boykin, linking specialist and CEO of We Build Pages, Justin Schoen, of Organic Rankings.com, Ben Pfeiffer, Derek Chew President of Organic Rankings . If you’re ever at a SES conference or WebmasterWorld, seek out these fun lovers, sit down and have a few drinks with them. I guarantee you’ll have a lot of fun.

SES Conference Day 2

Where would the search industry be without them? Jerry Yang, Founder of Yahoo, Danny Sullivan, Founder of Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies Conferences and Alen Meckler, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JupiterMedia.

This picture did not come out so good but if it did you would see over 1000 people in a giant room all listening intently to Jerry Yang as he discussed Yahoo past 10 years, present and future.

One of the new, fun and interesting people I got to meet at this year’s SES conference was Massimo Burgio (pictured left), San Francisco Branch Manager of Ad Maiora, a Rome based Search Engine Marketing firm specializing in international search with offices in Milan and San Francisco. I’m looking forward to working with Massimo in the coming year to help extend Backbone’s international SE marketing capabilities.

Greg Jarboe who is always informative and entertaining gives his Public Relations Via Search Engines Presentation.

After Greg was finished his presentation, I jumped on over to the What is Spam Session moderated by Rebecca Lieb, Executive Editor, the ClickZ Network
with Speakers: Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla, Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google, Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo!, Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director, GrantasticDesigns.com.

I got there just in time to hear the latest from Matt Cutts (GoogleGuy) about how Google is filtering for spam. He provided some blatant examples of what he and his team at Google like to call Grand Slam spammers. These are folks that go to each and every length to artificially increase their page rank. Matt said, “If they just spent half that time and effort on creating a good user experience.” The bottom line is Google does not like it, don’t do it.

Nacho Hernandez, SearchEngineWatch Forums moderator and multilingual search expert looks on as Greg Boser takes the stand for the defense.

At one point while Boser was making his case for exceptions to Google's no spam rules, Thurow objected to some of the finer points. That caused Judge Lieb to slam down the gavel for order in the court. Boser continued making his case. He seemed have the hearts and minds of the jury. Google is the Supreme Court. It was a fun session. Getting good value for my time at this conference.

Google Guy fields questions from the jury pool.

Out in the hallway I asked Rebecca Lieb, Executive Editor, the ClickZ Network and Paul Gardi, of Ask Jeeves / Teoma if I could take their picture. They graciously obliged.

Stpephen Spencer talks about RSS, blogs and feeds.

Mike Grehan and Eric Ward. If you've never heard Mike Grehan speak then you're missing out on one of the great orators in the marketing industry.

SES Conference Inside the Exhibits Hall

Scenes from inside the Yahoo! Party

Francis and Olga from Backbone mingle with Abraham Mezrich from did-it.com

Search engine marketing expert Heather Lloyd-Martin with Chris Sherman, Search Engine Watch's Associate Editor.

Dana Todd, the new Sempo President. Congratulations!

Dan Boberg from Overture / Yahoo

Greg Boser doing his best Ozzy Impression.

This friendly cab driver took us over to the Google Party.

Scenes from inside the Google Party

Mike the bartender at the Google party. It was tough to get a drink from this guy even when I was tipping him but he sure knew how to strike a bartender pose.

I topped off the night with Pierre Zarokian and Shailen Lodhia - Sr. Account Executive from Submit Express.