Fed, fresh and caffeinated, #seschi sends us back to the session rooms for more learning. The first afternoon session I attended was Strategic Use of User-Generated Content (UGC) for SEO presented by Michael DeHaven, Sr Product Manager SEO of Bazaarvoice.  Prior to starting the session, DeHaven gave away Ghiradelli chocolates to 5 attendees within the session and gave them the instructions to eat the chocolate immediately and write a review of their experience.

Find out how the chocolate and more importantly the reviews were used within this session:

This is part 2 of my coverage of the webinar, “From Click-Through-Rate to Conversion Rate: Conversion Tactics for SEO & SEM.”  If you missed my blog post on part one, you can find it here.  The speaker for the second portion of this webinar is Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners.

5 Quick Tips to Increase Lead Volume

1. Make Your Call to Action Clear

Don’t hide what you want the user to do.  Tim likes to give the page the “Mother-in-Law Test:” if your mother-in-law couldn’t find your action on the page, then you have a problem.

After a short break for coffee and some delicious chocolate snacks, it is time for the final session of the day at SMX East 2011. In this presentation Shari Thurow, Found and SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive, discusses search engine friendly web design (#SMX #14A). Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster is moderating.

As Panda continues to change, how can it be applied to actual practices, and how can you Panda-Proof your content? These were the discussion points for the first afternoon session at SMX East 2011 today. Speakers included Heather Lloyd-Martin, Dr. Horst Joepen, and Chris Silver Smith.

It’s a constant battle. You want great usability for your website, but at the same time, you have to consider the needs of the search engine robots. Sometimes prepping a site for search engines can seem limiting on the usability side. But there is a way to “have your cake and eat it too,” especially when it comes to creating navigation on your website. Avoid the Javascript and turn to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead!

I often hear clients say that specific types of navigation layouts won’t work without Javascript. Poppycock. CSS is very powerful today, and you can accomplish many of the same approaches for navigation with CSS as you can with Javascript. Take for instance the ubiquitous drop-down, cascading navigation menus, which I’ll demonstrate in this post.