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Continuing with the theme of providing the most value from Search Engine Strategies San Jose, here's what I found useful in Day 2. The session was called Personalization, User Data & Search and featured Jonathan Mendez, Richard Zwicky, Dave Davies, Gord Hotchkiss, Sep Kamvar and Tim Mayer.

• Gord Hotchkiss presented the findings from an eye tracking study in which they tested the introduction of personalized results in Google's organic SERP. The conclusion was more clickthroughs, time spent and fixations on the results. The takeaway here is the importance of optimizing your results to be included in Google's personalized results. This includes applying themes to your website, adding competitive comparisons (to keep users on your site longer), adding useful widgets to engage visitors and to promote back links through the viral affect.
  
  Sep Kamvar of Google confirmed that it is important to keep users on your site as long as possible, furthermore, widgets are an excellent way to engage users. Tim Mayer of Yahoo mentioned that it was important for your site to become experts on a unique subject and to use Delicious and Yahoo answers to help with this.
• Jonathan Mendez brought up another good point on how companies should offer personalized content on their sites by analyzing all parts of referring URLs (esp search engines) such as: Language, Silo, and keyword. Natural search engine parameters are very easy to decipher using standard server side scripting languages such as PHP or ASP so try serving up dynamic content based on the parameters in the URL.

On another note, if anyone found a Silver Canon A85 Digital Camera at the Google Dance, please let me know, thanks!

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