Search Engine Strategies Round-up

It's Monday afternoon and I'm just now finishing up my trek through a week's worth of email. (and that's just reading it... I still have to write back to folks!) Many thanks to David Wallace for serving as guest blogger last week so that I could focus on the show. Those that enjoyed his writing will want to check out his new search marketing blog. Last week's Search Engine Strategies in NYC was the largest ever, with more than 5,000 attendees and three floors of Expo Hall exhibits.

There's plenty of online posting about the show for those that were unable to make it. Mike Grehan wrote about it today in ClickZ and of course Barry Schwartz and company continued their excellent tradition of session-by-session coverage over at Search Engine Round Table.

While I was fairly busy this time around with six sessions (five as moderator, one as speaker), as always the most entertaining session was to be had at "Pimp My Site." (WebProNews has a picture of our entrance and ShoeMoney from SEW forums has video.)

The beautiful thing about Pimp My Site is the way that companies keep stepping up to the plate to make donations. The site we worked on this time around was FlutterFetti Confetti, a company run by a great lady from New Orleans that lost everything to Katrina. Along with our work to fix up her site, companies like Microsoft, Ask Jeeves, Clicktracks, Miva, SEO-PR and many more pitched in with generous freebies to help make our work have even more impact.

The next english-language SES in the states is this August in San Jose. The San Jose show is usually the largest of the year, so it will be interesting to see if it manages to top the NYC show. Thankfully, the San Jose show is usually the least expensive to attend as well since nearby hotels can be booked for reasonable rates.