The Search Engine Strategies Conference tour kicked off the 07
season in fine fashion by appearing in one of the most popular
cities in the world - New York City.

A controversial piece of the SEM puzzle considers whether or
not a marketer’s advertisement suits the quality requirements
of the search engines. A session at SES New York brought out the
opinions from reps of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft about ads and
quality scores.

The trio of speakers from those search advertising companies at
the SES New York question and answer session on “Ads In A Quality
Score World” talked in general terms about quality ad strategy.

Major search engines Ask, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo jointly
announced at SES New York their support of a new feature that
makes sitemaps more valuable to webmasters.

It’s called autodiscovery, and those search engines, along with
IBM, have embraced the sitemaps concept wholeheartedly. Webmasters
can now place the location of their sitemaps inside a robots.txt
file, where crawlers will find it proactively.

SES New York reached out to attendees in one session where
moderator Chris Sherman enabled the conversation on social
search.

Humans had the firm hand in organizing web content in directories
before search engines improved the online experience
algorithmically. What goes around comes around, as the best
improvements available to search may be in the hands of its all
too human users.

Some marketers swear by what a well-made Wikipedia entry can do
for one’s online presence. But the perils are many and the
punishments are swift for those who try to game the online
encyclopedia for personal gain.

As our Joe Lewis noted earlier about Wikipedia’s potential for
marketing purposes, even the savviest pros can run afoul of the
site’s numerous editors. Barry Swartz of SERoundtable narrowly
missed having his entry banned by the site.

Let’s be blunt: Getting your products listed in the shopping
search engines is a tedious, cyclical, pain-in-the-butt process.
But it’s also necessary if you want to get the most out of online
retail. At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York,
those in the know spill what they know about shopping search
optimization.

The session, simply titled “Shopping Search Tactics,” featured
presentations from analyst Brian Smith of ComparisonEngines.com,
and from Brian Mark, chief technical officer at Toolbarn.com.

Smith opened his portion with a gloomy warning: This will not be
as easy as Google AdWords. If you’re submitting your product
information to a shopping engine, read the directions carefully
- each engine has its own guidelines for data feed submissions.

If you check out the Google search results for most terms, you’ll
find Wikipedia at or near the top of the list.

The popular user-collaborated encyclopedia has more page views
than Digg and MySpace, and could be largest untapped resource in
online marketing to date.

Danny Sullivan moderated today’s session focused on the viability
of Wikipedia as an online marketing tool.