All week long, I’ve been reporting on the top 10 stories from each day of Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008. Generally, they were generated by news coverage of the three keynotes and two Orion Panels, or interviews with speakers at the 63 conference sessions. Hey, that’s just fishing where the fish are.

But there were a couple of other places where I found underreported stories from SES Chicago 2008: SES Magazine, the Expo Hall, the free mini clinics, and the search training workshops.

If you didn’t attend Search Engine Strategies Chicago this year, find someone who did. And “borrow” his or her copy of SES Magazine. There is a lot of content in there – beyond the conference information.

For example, there’s an article by Kate Kaye, senior editor of ClickZ News, entitled “Politics 2.0: Political Change Comes to Search, Too.” It looks at the search marketing tactics that Chicago’s own Barack Obama and his rivals used during the 2008 presidential electiion. My favorite underreported story is how the campaigns employed search to take advantage of hot topics right away.

If you can’t find someone with a copy of SES Magazine, then check out the interview below with Kate, which appeared back in June.

Obama Ads Online: Search Advertising Analysis by Kate Kaye

Meanwhile, over at booth #315 in the Expo Hall, ideaLaunch was giving demos of WordVision, its new SEO software tool that uses a complex algorithm to recommend hot keywords to SEO writers. Yes, that got my attention. And once this content is uploaded to a website, it tracks the contents’ impact on search engine listings so that SEO managers can understand the overall ROI of content assets. Yes, that got my attention, too.

But wait! There’s More!

Over at booth #204, there were a series of free mini clinics. Tim Ash, the President of SiteTuners, ran one called, “Your Baby Is Ugly - Landing Page Mini-Critiques.” David Szetela, the CEO of Clix Marketing, ran another called, “Power PPC Advertising Clinic.” Jonathan Mendez, Founder and CEO of RAMP Digital, ran a third called, “ CPA Optimization Station.” And Brad Geddes, Founder of bgTheory.com, ran a fourth called, “Ad Copy to Landing Page Review.”

In fact, check out what Kurt Scholle, Head Coach of WebAsylum.com, wrote about them at Website-ROI-Guy:
— I Met a Rockstar at Search Engine Strategies/Chicago
— Your Baby Is Ugly - Landing Page Mini-Critiques (SES Chicago)

Okay, so maybe the mini clinics weren’t as underreported as SES Magazine and the Expo Hall stories. But it doesn’t hurt to overreport them, does it?

Finally, there are the six search training workshops, which will be held on Friday, Dec. 12 at the Chicago Hilton. These include:

Search & Analytics Workshop: Using Analytics to Increase Search Effectiveness — Analytics are a gold mine of information, just waiting to be uncovered. The results of campaigns, effectiveness of the website, and the efficiency of your rankings can all be measured with a good analytics program. Unfortunately, many site managers do not make changes to the website without prior measurement, nor do they measure after the changes. As a result, there are many changes to sites that are not based on facts, merely assumptions. Similarly, if changes are not analyzed, then there can be no clear understanding of whether or not improvements made a difference on the site or to the bottom line.

Viral Marketing & Link Baiting — Attendees will gain a better understanding of the concepts, ideas and implementations that are required to launch a viral marketing or link baiting campaign. They will learn why the Internet has created a unique environment that allows for rapid, inexpensive word of mouth marketing and how they can harness that environment to promote their own products and services. The workshop will give real life examples of both good and bad viral marketing campaigns and will share insight on how your business can capitalize on your competitor’s viral disasters. This workshop will also focus on how you can make use of consumer generated media environments like social media outlets, blog marketing, discussion forums and more to both monitor and expand your company’s online persona. Consumer generated media (the very core of viral marketing) is the fastest growing form of media online today. It’s only a matter of time until someone online talks about your business. This course will not only help prepare you in the ways to respond to the conversation, it will help you learn how to shape that conversation to your advantage.

Link Building Tactics, Tools & Techniques — Need links? In order to rank well and successfully promote your online business, you need an effective link building program as part of your overall SEO strategy. This link building workshop will help you to better understand and manage your link building campaigns by providing you with the knowledge to create proven, practical and creative link marketing campaigns. You’ll walk away understanding why you need certain links, how to find them, and how to effectively use links to promote your brand and your search engines rankings.

Advanced AdWords – This session is broken down into two sections. The first section examines how to effectively use keywords, ad copy, landing pages, and the search and content networks to effectively reach your target audience based upon where consumers are in the buying cycle. The second section will examine different bidding strategies you can employ to maximize your campaign’s goals.

Search Engine Optimization Workshop — A search-engine friendly Web site is a user-friendly, search-friendly, and persuasive site that converts visitors into buyers. In order for a site to be search-engine friendly, it must meet the terms and conditions set forth by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, Ask, etc). Additionally, the site must satisfy the needs of site visitors. Ultimately, the site must be profitable for the Web site owner. Can a single site satisfy all of these groups? This workshop will demonstrate that these skills are essential for building a user-friendly, search-friendly, and persuasive site that converts visitors into buyers.

Optimizing for Universal Search — Universal search changes everything! The advent of Google’s Universal Search has been called “the most radical change to its search results ever.” So, how do you take advantage of Google’s new approach that blends listings from news, maps, video, and image search among those it gathers from web search? This training session will help you get found in all the right places.

The full-day training session is $1,345 and half-day is $745. Register for SES SEM Training at http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/chicago/training.html.

Now, I realize that the search training workshops haven’t even been held yet. So, it may be premature to call them underreported. But trust me on this. Most of the journalists and bloggers who covered SES Chicago 2008 this week have already headed home. So, I’m pretty confident predicting that this, too, will be one of the underreported stories from the conference and expo.

Hey, I could be wrong. As Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

As most of us know, Google is fond of tailoring its results for the target audience and returning results applicable to the user’s location and various attributes, where as Live and Yahoo are …

Moms are now packing more activity into their day, according to a new data released by AOL’s Platform-A. A survey of 7,000 women found that the average internet-using mom reports conducting 27 hours of activities during the day.

On average they spend:

• 2.6 hours on the internet
• 2.1 hours of television
• 1.2 hours a day listening to the radio
• 30 minutes with newspapers, magazines and games

Parenting was the #1 online activity conducted by moms. They use the internet for advice on parenting and as a resource to help their children learn.

Another popular online activity is shopping

• 79% of those surveyed use the internet for shopping.
• 52% use the internet to find coupons or sales.

So how do moms feel about search? They associated the words “task-oriented,” “focused,” and “interested” with search. 71% use the internet to find information.

Websites were described as “entertainment.”

Hopefully, your website is entertaining to moms and offers them coupons or sales. Because 86% report being the primary decision maker in their household.

52% will recommend a good brand to others (another reason why social media is so hot!).

And moms like to share media with their children. 95% of moms share at least one form of media with their children at least once a week. Here’s what they share.

• 79% share television
• 62% share internet
• 58% share mobile phone
• 48% share digital camera
• 38% share email
• 33% share games

Do moms fit into your target audience? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Related Reading:
Playing the Game With Mom
E-Mail Marketers Haven’t Forgotten Mom
Sitting Pretty: Finding Moms Online

In a layman’s parlance, keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.

Step 1: Keyword Identification

The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: “cat food” and “dog food”.

Step 2: Locate Your Keywords

The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularities, you can make use of the Aleksika keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.

Step 3: Choose Keywords

The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.

Instead of making your search more vague and inaccurate, (which generally happens when you try to choose one-word keywords), it is suggested that you focus your concentration on only those keywords that can be easily managed. And that would typically mean phrasal keywords.