SES 2008 Hamburg – Recap

I’m currently on my way back from Hamburg to Berlin where I attend to the Search Engine Strategies Conference 2008. Last years SES was held in Munich, now they moved over to Hamburg. Originally it was planned to do SES 2008 in Mai (just a day after SMX 2008) which would have been completely stupid. It was absolutely the right move to change the location and also the date of the event.

On day one the session’s quality was very, very basic – in my opinion too basic even though there was a separate track for “advanced” strategies and tactics. I’d say there were there presentations worth mentioning:

• The keynote from Martin Sinner of idealo.de
• Andrew Girdwood (bigmouthmedia) who talked about video and image optimization.
• Pascal Fantou (Cogito Ergo) who gave some general advice on how to convert users to become buyers.

Nothing really new, all of this has been covered on the US conferences before, of course – but well presented and the best stuff from day one, keep up the good work guys

The conference hotel and the location in general have been OK but there are some things which could have been a little “better”:

• Tables: I’d recommend to have at least some tables in the conference rooms; it’s really annoying to always have the laptop on your knees or even better try to take some notes on there.
• Session content: As mentioned above (at least for me) it would have been great to have some more advanced stuff out there. Of course I know that there we’re not too many professionals but more attendees from companies in general – anyway, maybe there is the need to have a better explanation on what is considered “advanced” and who should attend to such a session, etc.
• Food: Yeah… right, today it was really good but we definitely should forget about day one (fast, please…) – could have been better.

Day two started better then the first one; I’ve been to “Date the search engines” which was basically a product presentation of Google (Niels Dörje), Yahoo! (Andreas Krawcyzk) and ask.com (by Isabella Silberberger) – some nice Q&A to follow.

In my opinion the best session on day two (and probably on the SES 08 at all) was “Link Building Strategies 2008”: Thomas Promny talked about “link buying that does not work anymore”, Marcus Tandler stated “not to buy links, simply buy complete websites” (argh Marcus, you shouldn’t have done that ), Ralph Tegtmeier presented a software to auto-generate huge amounts of content and Nina Baumann added some strategies to increase the internal link structure to pass link juice in a controlled way (by doing PR sculpting, siloing, etc. – which I think was a little too advanced for most of the attendees, but anyway: Good presentation!).

Networking was really good because of the “loungy” atmosphere in front of and between the conference rooms, great! Keep that – or even better: Add some more sofas, they were amazing! I have to admit that I currently prefer the SMX series (in general, not only the German one) but I think it was good to have some changes as Kevin did them.

I would really like to see SMX and SES both staying in Germany because there definitely is the need to educate SEO and SEM out there, especially in Germany.

This said… see you all at PubCon, Las Vegas