You'll all be glad to know that following yesterday's rather disappointing lunch, I went out today and had a calzone at an excellent Italian restaurant. The only negative aspect to this is that I'm feeling rather bloated due to all the carbs, and so really need some great presentations to grab my attention. 

Session 4: Video & Podcast SEO

I debated whether or not to attend this session as I felt that it could either be absolutely fascinating or, well, not. One speaker in and I'm worried that it may be the latter. Admittedly, there's some good stuff on using ID3 tags when creating podcasts, but unfortunately I'm only human and can't separate a presentation from the way in which it is presented.

I think that the organisers of any conference should be made to sit through every session so that they can get a feel for the varying levels of presentational skills that the visitors have to endure. I actually feel that most of the presentations at SES have been reasonably strong, but there are still too many who simply put their script onto slides and then read them back to an audience (who can probably all read themselves).

There are also often too many sales pitches (again, SES London hasn't been too bad this year*), so when Onil Gunawardana from blinkx stands up, my heart sinks. Apparently they're the biggest video search engine there is and have indexed over 18 million hours of video. They've also produced a guide to video SEO, but Onil isn't going to take us through it. Why not? That's what were here for! If you do want to read it, you can find the link to the PDF here.

If you want to read more about blinkx (and you probably should, it's pretty interesting - I just resent typing up a pitch), then TechCrunch is a good a place as any.

Tim Gibbon from Elemental, who also spoke in this morning's News SEO session, goes over some of the same points that have already been covered: using keywords in descriptions, titles, & tags; creating individual pages for each piece of content; putting keywords in URLs; ensuring that content is RSS friendly. Any of this sound familiar? Yeah, me too. Tim does use a real-life example, but he does suffer slightly from the fact that the session organiser doesn't seem to have checked the various presentations to make sure that they don't overlap too much. I would have loved to have seen an in-depth case study of the work they did on the Adidas campaign, but maybe that's just me.

I'm afraid that when the final speaker stood up and announced that he was the CEO of an in-video advertising start-up, I seriously felt like walking out. So I did.

Session 5: Images & Search Engines

I was planning to cover the session on searcher behaviour, but it's standing room only and I haven't mastered blogging whist standing up yet, so Images & Search Engines it is.

Both Li Evans of KeyRelevance and Scottie Claiborne highlight the reasons that sites should be optimising images, and they're compelling ones. The numbers of searches are immense and it is, in many ways, still an untapped market. Li shows some great examples of popular consumer products where the only images showing in search results are ones being submitted by the consumers themselves; the retailers are missing out on huge opportunities to attract traffic to products they sell, which the market is interested in. Li also points out, with the help of some compelling case studies using Hilary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani as examples, that with the advent of universal search, image optimisation should also be a consideration in terms of reputation management.

The final speaker is Maile Ohye of Google. (I don't think you need me to link to their site. Oh, ok then.) The first thing that she points out is that doing a search for, let's say, "flower images" in the main, blended search and in the image search itself will return different results. There are, apparently, different systems ranking them. 

Maile also details the factors that Google takes account of when indexing and ranking images:

• Colour, texture, & spatial layout
• Information surrounding the image (text, etc.)
• Quality of the image
• Quality of the site 
• Layout of the page
• Attributes, alt
• Hotlinking (where an image is pulled from another site)

One thing that highlights the point Li made is a site called Schmapp; it's a tourist guide where all the photos are, as far as I know, taken from Flickr. I mention it because they contacted me to ask if they could use a photo I took in Sydney. Obviously I said yes, and it's just a great example of a place where you might be able to seed content if you have interesting images.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before the final session as I had a prior engagement, which was a real shame as I was definitely looking forward to the session on Social Search. This is the end of my second day at SES London 2008; it's been a mixed day, but overall a good show.

Tomorrow should be a good day, with site clinics and sessions on brand reputation management & looking at the brave new world of consumer generated & controlled content. And, of course, there's the promise of free beer to look forward to in the evening.

*I was told that a speaker in the European Case Studies session made a comment about my post from yesterday, where I said that the Mobile session started off with sales pitches. What I of course went on to say is that the discussion which followed was thoroughly interesting, and this is really my point. I have no issue with vendors speaking, I just personally think that they're more likely to make sales when they concentrate on imparting interesting information in an engaging way.

This isn't meant to be an exercise in SES bashing - I've really enjoyed it but just feel that, in common with every single conference I've ever been to, it could benefit from a bit more quality control. Which probably means that I'll never be asked to speak at SES, which will well & truly learn me, I guess. 

Ciarán heads up the SEO & Social Media team at online marketing agency Altogether Digital. He wishes he didn't have to leave SES early.