Yesterday was Day 2 of SES Toronto 2008 and I enjoyed it even more than Day 1! To start things off the Press room had Internet today which made it easy to connect and take a break from the excitement that was going on outside.

Best Workshop: SEM Toolkit

The best workshop of the conference for me was yesterday’s SEM Toolkit. The description piqued my interest:

Competitive intelligence, keyword research, customer profiling, exotic analytics, and visual mouse tracking are just some of the tricks of the trade of search marketers. Guerrilla marketers on the panel show you the favorite tools in their kits. Many are low cost or free.

My favorite presenter was Ken Jurina of Epiar. With only 15 minutes to speak Ken listed off a new tool almost every 30 seconds and gave web entrepreneurs a fantastic list of SEO-related resources to add to their arsenal. Most of them were free and could be used immediately to help you grow your online business. I’m still waiting for Ken’s slides to be added to the conference website. He warned us that it would be too much to write down ourselves and he didn’t disappoint!

Man on a Mission

I also went to today’s conference on a mission. It always helps with these conferences if you have questions and know what you’re looking for - you’ll probably find an answer! Over the past month I’ve had a peculiar issue on my site where I’m still ranking in the same prominent positions for many of my important keywords but my traffic was down. MSN and Live traffic were up. Yahoo was consistent. But Google was down. Why would my traffic numbers be down if I’m still ranking #1 or #2 for the keywords? Seeing as I had some of the best from the industry in front of me, I figured I would ask their opinion.

Up first was Ian McAnerin of McAnerin Networks Inc.. Ian McAnerin is the “SEM Resources and Advice” moderator for the High Rankings Forum, the “Search and Legal Issues” moderator for the Search Engine Watch forum, a DMOZ editor, and has been vetted by the strict standards watchdogs SEOConsultants.com and SEOPros.com directories. Ian suggested that it might be an accessibility issue. His theory was that I was still getting the clicks but perhaps the pages weren’t loading properly and therefore the hits weren’t being recorded.

Lucky for me a speaker at the next seminar was Joe Dolson, a Web Design Consultant, and an accessibility expert. On the break I checked out my site on Browsershots.org. Browsershots (one of Ken Jurina’s tool suggestions) let’s you see what your website looks like in all the various browsers. I submitted my site and it looked fine in all the browsers except Internet Explorer 4 (does anyone still use IE4???). After the session I spoke with Joe and he couldn’t think of any problems off the top of his head. His only thought was that perhaps the site had a virus or a hack attack that would prevent the page from loading. He kindly offered to look at the site in more detail if I sent him a follow up email. Thanks Joe!

Next up was the Site Clinic where entrepreneurs could submit their websites and get them reviewed by the experts. In this case the experts were: Anne Kennedy, Manager, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink, Larry Bailin, CEO, Single Throw Internet Marketing, and Jim Hedger, SEO Consultant, Metamend Search Engine Marketing. Figuring that there would be a rush of people trying to submit their sites for review I got there early, introduced myself to Larry and got my site reviewed as the second example (good thing too because we ran out of time and didn’t get to everyone). Larry and Jim made some suggestions for the usability of my site and their theory on the Google issue was that either it was just a down time and people weren’t searching for entrepreneur related articles as much or Google was doing an update and some of my pages got downranked. If it’s a cyclical issue then there is nothing else I can do but wait it out. Anne suggested opening a new section devoted to how to “make it” in tough economic times to help drive new traffic.

Worried about the Google update issue I came home and checked my rankings across multiple Google Data Centers. I’m still ranked at the top so I’m glad that’s not the problem. It may be back to the drawing board for me but I’m going to connect with the speakers again to let them get a more in depth look at the site as it’s hard to make a judgment call on the spot without having done any research on the website.

Overall it was an excellent conference. I learned a lot of new tricks, made a few new connections, and left with a renewed passion to drive even more traffic through the search engines! As the slides of the presenters become available I’ll share a few more of the insights that we learned so you can also benefit from the experience.