Google engineers talking openly about the latest challenges in indexing web content. Search marketers getting their heads around building promotions on Twitter.  Lunch networking sessions exploring obscure tips and tricks. This year’s San Jose SES had it all, with a glow-in-the-dark Google Dance to boot.

Although SES hosts events around the globe, the San Jose event has traditionally attracted considerable attention due to its proximity to the campuses of the major search engines. This year…

There were many sessions at SES San Jose 2008 on getting more value from SEM traffic and improving the usability of SEM landing pages. Although not so well attended (being the last day of the conference), this session did contain many useful tips and tricks for landing page optimization.

Moderator:
Anna Maria Virzi, Executive Editor, ClickZ

Speakers:
Carrie Hill, Search Engine Watch Expert & Certified Search Engine Marketing & Promotion Account Manager, Blizzard Internet Marketing…

Subtitle: How The Art of Storytelling Matches Up With the Business of Marketing

Stories have been around since the beginning of communication, and there’s a reason: it’s a form of communication that beats all others when it comes to delivering a memorable, motivating, and meaningful message.

This is another session that deals with the popular (and someone thorny) issue of how to handle visitors once they get to your site. In addition, this session also covered…

What you do with visitors after you get them to your site was a common topic this year.  By improving the site conversation rate for traffic delivered by search can make or break a campaign. In this session, ‘persuation architect’ Bryan Eisenberg teamed up with Brett Crosby, one of the founders of Urchin (now Google Analytics) to explain what you can monitor, tools that can help, and how to act to improve campaign performance.

Speakers:…

Just in case you are looking for a way to test a web application/design and don’t have access to every operating system and browser configuration, check out BrowserCam : Screen capture for cross platform compatibility testing.

The free trial is limited to 24 hours but it will give you an idea of what the system is capable of.

Ouch. Just judging by the comment threads on this blog you can see that this really has touched a nerve. You can read Todd Wilkens full visceral post here:

http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/07/17/why-usability-is-a-path-to-failure/

The basics are this - in art we look for moments of wonder, not that just the mundane prerequisites have been met. A book should be ground-breaking, not just readable. The problem with usability is that it concentrates too heavily on the ‘readable’ at the expense…

One of our marketing managers pointed me to this site:

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/

It’s a journal dedicated to testing marketing campaigns. Interesting stuff for newbies like me. I now know what ‘variable cluster testing’ is, and how it can be useful.

More than that, they seem to have narrowed in on the right questions - such as how can I optimize a free trial offer? Or what’s the best format for landing pages?

Some of their conclusions are not exactly…