Adventure Travel World Summit Report

Search Engines were a hot topic at the Adventure Travel World Summit, held Oct 20-21 in Seattle.

http://www.adventuretravelworldsummit.com/atws-agenda.html

I co-presented in a workshop, along with Annie Ellicot and Elizabeth Osmoleski. Several other sessions also discussed search engines in the context of online marketing. I focused on page structure and analytics. Some data I mentioned:

--external links from resource sites, such as blogs, About.com, Wikipedia and others, are driving more traffic for some of my clients than second and third tier search engines.

--page and site structure is getting to be ever more complicated with the emerging interest of Ajax.

--people who are working on a site redesign should first try to establish a baseline with an analytics package in order to understand visitor experiences at their site

Attendees at the Summit came from five continents. It is always interesting to realize what questions were not asked:

--no one asked about optimizing for non English sites
--no one seemed to be in a state of panic over possible mistakes made in optimizing their site

Compared to last year, I felt the interest in search engines was even higher and definitely the knowledge level of attendees seemed higher.