Heading into the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose last week, I'd been at Yahoo! just over a week. The four-day summer event was a welcome respite to my new gig and certainly to some of my colleagues who were beginning to feel a little stuffed in their cubes and meeting rooms. We all headed down to the San Jose Convention Center to connect with our users, share the hot trends in the industry and learn a thing or two from the experts in the field. My first SES experience was pretty successful overall, so I thought I'd share a few takeaways for those who couldn't make it...

Memorable Delivery
Mikkel deMib Svendsen is a resident authority on advanced problems with frames, dynamic pages, Flash, cloaking, etc., but it was his wry humor and flamboyant delivery of search engine fundamentals (content, link and spiders) that roused even the most avid snoozers at the "Fun with Dynamic Web Sites" panel on Tuesday.

Trend That Piqued My Interest
Personalization and Web 2.0
P10n will change the way search engines rank the results and users look at them.

• Jonathan Mendez's visual research data in "Personalization, User Data & Search" on Monday showed user scanning is more scattered with personalized results and varies with chunking. Also, link popularity and the emergence of thematic "buzz" sites greatly extend the role of links in SEO. Check out Online Marketing Blog for more details.
• Vanessa Fox and Amit Kumar in the Web 2.0 session on Wednesday revealed that, while the user generated content and community sharing are the hallmarks of Web 2.0, AJAX (link sharing problem) or content design frameworks like CSS may not always be the right choice as they can be search engine unfriendly.

Standout Sessions
Sessions like "Organic Listings" and "Meet the Crawlers" moderated by Danny Sullivan, aimed to brainstorm the unresolved questions in the SEO community: copyright recognition, content copying, crawl frequency, and duplicate content problem. While there is no clear panacea in the continuously evolving world of search engines and web technologies, there are some common ways to troubleshoot these problems: reviewing Robots.txt regularly and using Site Explorer, Sitemap and the Dynamic Urls tab in Site Explorer.

Overall, the conference was quite the experience for a Yahoo! first-timer. I had the chance to meet several of you as we flitted across the main hall and hung around the various coffee tables and long restroom queues. I'd like to keep the conversation going, so hope to see you at another industry event soon.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search