Chicago SES / Search Engine Strategies Conference

Monte:-“Hello. Welcome back to Domain Masters. I’m glad you can join us, as we stated each week we are going have some pretty exciting guests on the show that will have some great tips and really relative content about to online identity and domain names, search engines and optimization. It’s a perfect lead in to my first guest, Noel McMichael, who is the current Vice President of Search Engine Marketing for Digital Engine, former CEO of Market Leap, a San Francisco based search engine and customer acquisitions solutions company. I had the pleasure of meeting Noel back at the SES meeting in San Jose and we became friends and played some poker together. Noel welcome to the show. How you doing?”

Noel:-“ I’m doing great. Thanks Monte. It’s great to be here.”

Monte:-“Yeah. I’m glad to have you and now I caught you on a jet plane on the way back, just ending up from the SES show. What was going on over there?”

Noel:-“It was crazy. It was very cold in Chicago but it was a great show. Lots of people there from the McCormick Center and I only got to go to two sessions but mostly network people great people. It was a fun show. Everyone’s getting revved up for 2005.”

Monte:-“I heard there were more than 3000 attendees at this show even though it was cold in Chicago.”

Noel:-“Well more like 2000 which I still think was up over what they had last year.”

Monte:-“You spoke at the conference. Correct?”

Noel:-“It was kind of a joke session. Like search engine marketing meets the Daily show, Danny Sullivan and Jeff Boursh had the idea to do a fake search engine, a fictitious merger of Google and Yahoo called Goohoo.”

Monte:-“They never know that may be a merger in the future,”

Noel:-“I was a really funny session. It was an kind of a opportunity to trade seats for some of us who been in the business for a long time kind of played Meet the Crawlers role. A lot of the time you got to the Meet the Crawlers session and you don’t really get all the juice you want to get out of these guys. So I think there was four of us that Greg Bowsure, Dana Todd, and myself and oh Andrew Goodman. We were all vice presidents of this search engine marketing and we asked a lot of different questions about different policies and trademark, about spam, and about paid inclusion, and editorial processes and it was just hilarious cause everybody was sort of tongue and cheek and the funniest thing of all was when Greg Bowsure who was the vice president of the editorial quality control.”

Monte:-“You’ve got to be kidding”

Noel:-“No no. We had Tim Myers in the room with Jonathon Glick from Yahoo. Some other guys just writing down their notes sometimes they’re laughing sometimes not. Sometimes not sure when to laugh!”

Monte:-“What were some of the hot topics you heard about? What’s yet to come?”

Noel:-“The click fraud was being talked about a lot. MSN Search had a gigantic boost there. They just came out. Everyone is buzzing about it.”