Here’s a list of all of my SES San Jose 2007 recaps, for quicker reference:

Top Ten Small Business Takeaways
Linkbaiting and Viral Search Success
Local Search Marketing Techniques
The Paid Links Debate
Searcher Behavior Research Update
Universal and Blended Search
Personalization, User Data, and Search
B2B Search Marketing Tactics
Marissa Mayer’s Keynote Interview with Danny Sullivan
Social Scene Recap

As my current clients can probably vouch for, I’ve been scarce for the past ten days or so–last week was a whirlwind tour of pubs, pizzerias, and parties. Oh, and a few very entertaining sessions at SES San Jose :).
With all of the truly amazing people in the SEO community, it’s shocking to me [...]

After completing my individual recaps of the biggest search conference of the year, I thought it’d be instructive to pare them all down to a Cliffs-Notes version for small business owners and local search marketers.
10. Now is the time to create a video related to your business. With all of the buzz around Google [...]

It’s a good thing unauthorized videotaping isn’t allowed at SES…if it were, the cameras might have caught me drooling with a faraway look in my eye for most of this session.  Three of my absolute favorite SEOs in the world (Rebecca Kelley of SEOmoz, Cameron Olthuis of CameronOlthuis.com, Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide) led [...]

Karen Breen Vogel of ClearGauge, Paul Slack of WebDex, and Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch Marketing presented on this panel, which sadly was focused more on PPC than SEO efforts in the B2B marketing space.
There were some interesting tidbits for B2B marketers and website designers offered by the panel, though.  Unlike B2C websites, where the goal [...]

Search Engine Guru Danny Sullivan sat down with Google’s Marissa Mayer for a relatively informal interview in front of several thousand folks at Wednesday’s keynote address.
Ms. Mayer seemed quite pleased with how Universal has turned out. In her words, Google’s idea is to move away from a “10 links” mentality and get the search [...]

Having attended this session with great anticipation last year (2006), and having been disappointed in the lack of creative tactics and actionable advice that was presented, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by the actionable techniques offered by the panel this year.
Justin Sanger of LocalLaunch was up first, starting the panel with an explosive stat: 2.2 [...]

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro was the clear ‘rockstar’ on this panel, presenting data from a series of eye-tracking studies his company had completed earlier this year.
His conclusion?  Personalized results do appear to work.  Time spent on each personalized result, as well as fixation, and clicks were all double when compared to ordinary results.
Interestingly, the embedding [...]

In what was easily the most exciting session of the conference, Google’s Matt Cutts squared off against Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen, and Greg Boser on the topic of paid links, with Upcoming.org’s Andy Baio providing a seemingly objective third-party view on the topic. The paid link proponents CLEARLY won the debate, in [...]

One of the SES sessions I initially thought might least apply to small and medium-sized businesses ended up being one of the most enlightening. All four of the panelists (Pavan Li of Microsoft, James Lamberti of ComScore, Stuart McKelvey of TMP Directional Marketing, and Oliver Deighton of Google) .
Pavan was up first, discussing a [...]