The Maine SEO Blog

So begins my long list of hybrid blogposts – notes from the SMX East Conference in New York City.

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Speaker: Cindy Krum, Director of New Media Strategy, Blue Moon Works, Inc.

• Searchers make an average of 9 mobile searches per day.
• iPhones have 5% of the mobile phone market, and 75% of all mobile searches.
• Mobile is important (mass mobile convergence, most personal marketing medium ever, more interactive marketing possibilities, mobile device on you at all times)
• Mobile is different (mobile bots, mobile algorithms, smaller screen, simplified rendering, more sophisticated searchers, have immediate intent)
• .mobi is BAD (splits traffic, links, index size; doesn’t benefit from history, risks duplicate content, confusing for users)
• Direct .mobi to real site; it’s no longer necessary to have a .mobi address
• External stylesheets/CSS creates separate design/copy for real site and mobile site
• Optimizing for phones, options: do nothing, create tiny pages for tiny screens, mobile/traditional hybrid pages

Speaker: Greg Markel, Founder and President, Infuse Creative

• iPhone Apps are important – creating one can increase revenue
• Another reason for “marketing message” in meta-tags: click for iPhone users to call immediately
• Greg’s prediction: in the future, there’s going to be a lack of keyword optimization, and instead location specific and device specific
• TRY APP: Urbanspoon; searching in Google causes the iTunes store to open w/ app → get google to index apps!!
• Set up YouTube channel → automatically makes site iPhone friendly by video default in interim before making site completely iPhone friendly

Speaker: Alex Muller, CEO, Slifter

• Slifter – local shopper app
• Create an iPhone app – what can you create for an entire app where you can actually HELP users??
• Loopt app – social network to find friends in the area → drive sales/advertising to specific location

Q & A

• New Nokia – going to run flash w/ “better” 3G
• Better browsers for mobile devices are coming
• SMS marketing converts better than any other mobile marketing – gather phone numbers w/ email addresses!
• Apps that go across all platforms – forward thinking
• Marketing apps: cannot marketing directly for iTunes URL, so use paid search for app description

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Tags: Expert Panel, iPhone, SEO, SMX East

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 10:23 am and is filed under Expert Advice, Search Engine Marketing, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.