JWP SEO Expert Panel and other adventures

Yesterday was the 1st day of 2009, and I decided that one of my new year resolutions would be to get back to blogging. So, expect a few posts from events in 2008 that I didn’t manage to get to in time.

I wrote that exactly 2 weeks ago, and here I am now, without even have finished writing up that post!!

You might be interested to hear what I’ve been doing in the last couple of months, since I got back from Thailand.

Getting back to real life …

Firstly, I had to catch up on work! There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and every holiday must be paid for in the end, so within a couple of days, I almost forgot that I had been away. 

Then, so as not to really forget a fantastic holiday, I actually downloaded my Thailand pictures – all 5 Giga of them – and organized them into folders. All that’s left is to upload a few of the best to somewhere on the web, and then at least one of my friends will be happy (the one who’s stopped complaining about my not having uploaded the previous year’s Marrakech pictures!).

JWP SEO Expert Panel

In the beginning of December, I was one of the panelists on the Jerusalem Web Professionals (JWP)  Expert SEO Panel (warning – facebook links!).

The JWP was set up about a year and a half ago by Kim Mayrose, who has recently decided that she is ready to step down from organizing the monthly meetings – great work, Kim, and good luck Charlie, on taking it over.

Anyway, back to the panel. It was held at the offices of PresenTense, and was packed to the gills. We had about 65 attendees, and 3 panelists: Charlie Kalech, Shimshon Young, and yours truly).

Each of the panelists had 2 parts to their talk: the first being an in-depth look about a particular approach to SEO, and the second being a set of 5 practical tips and tricks. 

Shimshon started with a talk about “What is SEO”, and his tips and tricks were:

• Create a favicon.ico
• Buy domain names for more than 1 year
• Add lots of pages to your site
• Create awsome content!
• The fastest way to #1? Buy the site that is at #1

Charlied spoke about “Optimization for Broad or Narrow Search?”, and his tips and tricks were:

• SEF URLs
• Title, Description & Keyword Tags
• “Word Spamming,” “Keyword Stuffing,” “Keyword Density”
• SEF Navigation
• Sitemaps

My talk was about “Page_rank_and_site_link_structure“, and my tips_and_tricks were:

• Off-site SEO (Link Building)
• PPC as part of keyword research
• Firefox add-ons
• Focus site on customers
• Google Trends

The presentations can be found on the J-town presentations page.

Other Adventures …

Channuka was an excuse for another short break, this time with the kids and all of my in-laws, who got together for 3 days to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday. Apart from the rain, a great time was had by all.

At long last, I’ve been spending time on my website, Debi-Z dot com, which will hopefully go live within a few days (stay tuned for an update on that), and I’ve been teaching a course in Software Testing at the College of Engineering in Jerusalem.

Last but by no means least, I’ve been taking an amazing “Founding and Managing a Start Up” course at ISEMI. The course has been a stepping stone to my seriously analyzing one of the ideas I had about 1.5 years ago for a new business. What is really cool is that with some inputs from the course tutors and other serial entrepreneurs who we have met, I have “passed GO“, although I haven’t yet reached  “collect $200” (anyone out there dying to invest in a really cool start-up?!).

So, that’s it for now, and I REALLY will  try to keep to that resolution, now that I’m back here.

Have a great 2009, everyone.

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