Webmasters of the world unite
With 600 webmasters, including a strong UK contingent, all the major search engines and numerous gurus, visionaries and the top technical brains in the search and affiliate marketing business, the agenda at the recent Webmasterworld Pub Conference in Orlando was an exciting one. The most interesting and useful sessions for anyone responsible for staying in the forefront of optimisation included:
- Tim Mayer introducing the new changes at Yahoo!, both at a technical and distribution level and the implications of merging the search teams of Yahoo with those of Inktomi, Fast and Overture.
- Paul Gardi of Ask Jeeves, explaining the unique coverage that Ask Jeeves offered its advertisers and demonstrated an overlap of only 10% between its audience and that of other search engines.
- Overture's Dan Boberg presenting the latest search term research, with particular reference to new findings about buyer behaviour online.
- Google's Matt Cutts talking about recent changes at Google and their implications for search engine optimisers and affiliate marketers.
- Bill Hunt, describing how a recent optimisation campaign for IBM resulted in an increase of search engine visibility from 5% of visitors to 60%.
Aside from the education sessions themselves, the Conference provided a vital opportunity for spammers, optimisers and search engines to put aside their differences, discuss market dynamics, exchange links and partners and share hints and tips in a neutral environment.
Weboptimiser's Marketing Director, Nicholine Hayward, compared the Pub Conference to December 25th 1915, when German and British troops are said to have laid their weapons aside, played a game of football and enjoyed a fine dinner in the officers' mess afterwards. Having seen Matt Cutts from Google, whose mission is only to improve the quality of his search engine's index, cordially drinking beer with some of the biggest spammers in the business, I can only agree.
David White
CEO
Weboptimiser Ltd
