Search Engine Strategies in New York was once again a good show. It seems to have grown again this year, and I always enjoy the opportunity to catch up with different people in the biz. Here are & major impressions I have following the show:

1. There is really so much opportunity out there. New things keep popping up that result in new ways to win big.
2. Podcasting is becoming main stream. I was shocked by how many people had listened to our podcast series. And there are podcasts on all types of subjects. This is one of those places where the playing field remains very level between large businesses and small businesses.
3. Video marketing is also becoming main stream. As with podcasts, the playing field is very level here.
4. As I have written many times before, we continue to cycle back to old fashioned marketing. Trust, and hence branding, is king. The only difference now is that the consumer is much, much more educated.
5. I have been thinking this for a long time, but it still blows my mind that tagging is back as a critical factor in web marketing (on sites like del.icio.us, for example). What a fragile way to build an industry! Of course, the good news with this version of tagging is that the fact that it’s open to the public provides some editorial balance.
6. The search marketing space is amazingly social. Competitors readily interact with each other, party after the show, help each other out.
7. I know I just used this term, but search marketing is no longer the right term. For example, getting a video to go viral on YouTube has nothing to do with search. We are really talking about web marketing now.

Net-net is that it was a great experience again. More to come in May with SMX, and other events.

Yesterday I attended the Podcast Optimization session at SES in NY. Chris Sherman was moderating and speakers were Amanda Watlington, Daron Babin, and Rick Klau, all of which provided very engaging presentations. It was a great and informative seession, and here are some highlights from it:

Market

1. The Podcast marketplace is expanding rapidly
2. Feedburner is managing over 100,000 Podcast feeds
3. Feedburner is tracking more than 5M subscribers
4. For every download at Feedburner, there is approximately one download directly from the hosting site
5. 2/3 of the subscribers use iTunes
6. Most of the rest use a web based service

Optimization Tips

1. Metadata is critical:
1. Title
2. Album
3. Artist (host)
4. Year
5. Track – Episode #
6. Genre – Podcast
2. Use the Comments section of the metadata to enter in basic info, Examples of things you could do here include:
1. Summary of the Podcast
2. The list of questions asked
3. A transcript of the Podcast
4. When the audience can expect the next episode
3. Find a good ID3v2 tag editor (this is where the metadata lives. Audacity is pretty good at this

Marketing

1. Do SEO optimized press releases about your Podcasts
2. Submit your Podcasts to the Podcast directories. There are a lot of these, but sometimes the small ones provide awesome volume, so submit to as many as you can find.
3. And, of course, ping, ping, ping every time you update your feed.

Personally, I think Podcasts represent a great opportunity. It’s still a very young market, but people are listening. Even with the sub par promotional job that we have done with our Podcasts here at STC, I keep having people come up to me and tell me that they have listened to one or other of the Podcasts we have done.