Search Engine Strategies is Next Week

My apologies to my readers for such a quiet week on the StepForth SEO Blog and for the nonexistent newsletter. I have been very busy trying to catch up on open contracts and prepare for my adventure to New York next week for the Search Engine Strategies conference.

I promise I will make it up to you next week with coverage from the conference. There are plenty of topics to delve into but the ones that strike me the most interesting are:

• The future of webmaster tools from search engines. Just how much information are they going to share and what is their ultimate intent? Google has already gone a lot further than I had ever expected.
• Duplicate content considerations are a hot topic for many of my readers as evidenced by the jaw dropping volume of questions I received from my recent article “The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication“. Yahoo recently released its planned participation in the SES conference and Amit Kumar, Yahoo Engineering Manager will be discussing Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues. I hope to make it to that presentation and perhaps record it for my readers.
• Personally, over the breadth of the show I will be keeping my eyes and ears open for the opinions of my peers regarding the future of SEO with Web 2.0. Where is Ajax going to take the user experience and what other technology will be juicing up the experience? With the current rate of search evolution it seems even the most loftiest guesses may have merit.

I still have yet to take the time and sit down to decide which presentations are MUSTS when in New York. Until then I will continue to prepare and get pumped for what will definitely be an information packed experience.