San Diego, California - (The Hosting News) - September 1, 2006 - The 2006 MIVA Small Business Conference entered its second day yesterday and continued to offer important and interesting educational tracks for the audience of several hundred online business professionals in attendance.

Among the sessions delivered, were two presentations addressing search engine optimization, and a session devoted entirely to the newly launched Google Checkout product.

The morning began with a comprehensive overview of organic search presented by Mr. Paul Bruemmer, the Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive. Mr. Bruemmer's comments were drawn from his impressive 11 years spent optimizing sites for organic search. His session was aimed to ''provide insight and techniques used in advanced SEO best practices methodologies''. In covering the topic, Mr. Bruemmer touched on the following points:

An overview of how search engine optimization, search engine spiders, and indexing;
Pros, cons, and methodologies of both organic search and pay-per-click techniques;
His RAMP SEO method for increasing organic search rankings;
Various tips grounded in deep experience such as date-stamping pages to understand the Google cache ;
An innovative and advanced SEO Predictive Modeler to determine the value of achieving high SEO results.

A very interesting twist on Mr. Bruemmer's presentation was the use of interactive audience surveys - made possible by a very cool new technology from www.turningtechnologies.com. At the beginning of the session, each participant received an RF ''response card'' - a small keypad that looked like a small calculator with 10 buttons for the digits 1-10. Mr. Bruemmer then asked questions of the audience during the talk to guide his comments to the specific needs of the audience. For example, at one point Mr. Bruemmer asked, ''Indicate if you are using: 1) Only PPC; 2) Only Organic Search; 3) Both PPC and Organic Search; or 4) Neither''.

Our audience response was:
PPC Only = 6%
SEO Only = 24%
Both = 71%
Neither = 0%

This was a great use of technology in a presentation - and kept the audience truly engaged. Overall a great session. To learn more about Red Door Interactive, please visit: www.reddoor.biz Another highlight of day 2 of the MIVA Small Business Conference was the presentation on the newly minted Google Checkout product delivered by Mr. Alex Brutin in Strategic Partner Development at Google and Mr. Andrew Manson, Technical Account Manager for Google Checkout. The pair demonstrated the ease of use and brand advantages of using Google Checkout as a compliment to other payment systems for consumers. The system simply requires that shoppers click the Google Checkout button, enter their Google user name and password, and place their order. A preset 'ship to' address and preferred credit card are then securely used to complete the transaction.

While the product has only been officially available for about 8 weeks, the potential for this streamlined ordering process across multiple vendors seems enormous. Another great feature of Google Checkout is that users can easily manage all of their purchases (again from multiple vendors) in one central location. A simple grid displays the items purchased, store purchased from, amount paid, and status of the order (pending, completed, transaction cancelled, etc.).

The presenters also pointed out the new Google Checkout Badge that appears in Google AdWords when the vendor is using Google Checkout. It has the appearance of a small shopping cart. It is Google's intention to assist merchants as ''shoppers look for the Google Checkout Badge'' to help find merchants to buy from.

Overall a very informative presentation on an important new product from the search engine leader, Google. To learn more about Google Checkout, please visit: https://checkout.google.com.

There were a number of other excellent presentations delivered at the MIVA conference. Look for further coverage, and full writeups on several of the educational sessions over the next few weeks.

To learn more about the MIVA Small Business Conference, please visit: http://smallbusiness.miva.com/conference_2006/.