By Caragh McKenna
Online Marketing Account Manager
Interactive Return sent a team to the Search Engine Strategies conference in London at the beginning of the month for the second consecutive year. The conference, run by Jupiter Media, was again both an informative and insightful event.
Although many of the seminars were in fact based on the same topics as last year, the innovations in our industry within the past 12 months did warrant a refresher course in some of the basics. Many of these basic sessions were followed by advanced sessions for the more experienced internet marketers.
Topics covered in the seminars included Designing for Search Engines, Search Engines & Language Issues, Search Engines & Branding Multi-country Campaign Management and Link Building Basics.
This year the London seminar had a distinctive UK and European theme with many of the seminars focusing on targeting the European markets and translating websites accordingly. While speaking to Matt Cutts of Google.com we picked up some interesting insights into Google's European outlook.
Google.com and Google UK have in recent years primarily focused on the <Title> tag when it comes to ranking websites. We learnt that the foreign language versions of Google do in fact read the <Description> and <Keyword> tags as well. Not only do they read this meta data but they rank websites based on the content of these tags. They also identify the appropriate market from this Meta data. Where a website is written in French but for example focusing on a Quebecquois market it is essential to include words such as "Quebec" and "Canada" in your meta data. This will ensure this site appears in the most appropriate version of Google, www.Google.ca.
We did press Matt for news on any changes in Google advertising policies further to the IPO but I was assured any speculation at the moment could not be confirmed.
The issue of the Google content advertising and the new image adverting was also raised however, one year later Google could still not provide us with a list of where content advertising appears. "We know your partners include AOL and Netscape but it would be great to actually see lists of industry specific partners". No?
Good news though, Google have no future plans to charge advertisers for their tracking facility.
We also pressed representatives from Yahoo on some less than transparent aspects of their service. We're still awaiting a response.
It was great to have this opportunity to press some of the leading experts in our industry and to hear about latest industry developments; we'll be looking forward to bringing Yahoo! SiteMatch, Google ad images and more to our clients in 2004.
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