• Search Marketing Standard, Thursday, March 13, 2008 10:45 AM

Kent Lewis boils down all his learnings from this year's SEMpdx SearchFest in Portland into 10 key points. The insights include observations from industry thought leaders, as well as random facts. For example, according to Steve Kemper, part of the reason Google has less than half the market share in China of Baidu is because "Google" is too difficult to spell in Chinese. Who knew?

In terms of optimization for e-commerce sites, Aaron Kahlow said that it's better to target drop-off at the beginning of the conversion funnel as opposed to the shopping cart level. "A slight increase there will boost results throughout the process," Lewis says.

Meanwhile, Lewis learned that not every page need a Meta description. According to Stoney deGeyter, pages ranking for long-tail keyword phrases may actually fare better when the search engines create the description automatically.

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