Wow, it’s been a long while since I posted here, and also a long time since I actually left my house and met people face-to-face. Well, face-to-face in terms of a professional meeting, some networking, and talking with other SEO & SEM geeks. Outside of my work I do leave my house. Sometimes. No, really, I do. If I have to.

Enough of my solitary endeavors. Last night I went with two friends to a presentation about SEO organized by Jerusalem Web Professionals, a group founded by Kim Mayroze. Kimm is head of Kimmdesign, a Jerusalem web studio specializing in creative concept development. I haven’t been to any previous JWP events, but I’ll be making a point to go in the future.

After her brief introduction, Kimm turned over the presentation to the three speakers. The first of them, Shimshon Young, owns a web site design company, Excellence Internet Service. His presentations were probably the shortest, but he offered practical tips that would be valuable to many sites; have awesome content, have lots of pages, buy multi-year registrations for your domains, and create a favicon (something I rarely do, and probably should).

Debi Zylbermann spoke next; with long-experience in high tech and QA, she moved into SEO comparatively recently. She’s very dynamic, and a confident speaker … her presentation was interesting but could perhaps have benefited from a dry-run rehearsal for a non “tech-head” friend first. Her explanation of page rank sculpting was fine for me, but my non-geek friend had zoned out within a minute or two.

I’m also slightly dubious about her method of using AdWords for keyword research. The concept is clever — aim your bids for position 9 or 10, and use the impression count for stats — but in practice I have a feeling that the data would not be terribly accurate. It’s hard to derive search numbers from impressions, since it depends on ad inventory for that term, quality score for that advertiser, etc. And of course, it doesn’t give a sense of which words are buying terms in the way that clicks would. I’d be more likely to use paid tools like Keyword Elite and SEO Elite, or even a free service like the SEO Book keyword suggestion tool.

The third speaker was Charlie Kalech, director of Jerusalem web design company J-Town Productions. He opened with the fishing clip from The Frisco Kid explaining the difference between broad search and narrow search … very cute, and put his point across very succinctly: “How hungry are you?”

Two strong themes that I got from his presentation:

• Plan your site structure early in the process in order to use keywords effectively. This will help both Google, and your users, find their way around.
• Know what sort of traffic you’re looking for. Understand the costs and benefits of attracting floods of traffic, versus getting only a trickle of traffic that’s intensely targeted to your content.

I had a good time at the event, and I’m pleased to have discovered Jerusalem Web Professionals. Looking forward to the next meeting so I can leave the BatCave once more before 2009.

Only one fly in the ointment … there were one or two attendees who had clearly come with an agenda of showing their own brilliance and superiority at the expense of the presenters. I mean, I like to hear myself talk as much as the next guy, but this was ridiculous.

One in particular managed to alienate pretty much the whole room within a sentence or two. But it was clear that he was familiar to the presenters, and they addressed him with the same kind of gentle, calming, and dismissive tone that I use on my crazy Uncle Louie … you know, the one who spends every Seder explaining that the CIA is bugging his potato kugel.

But the wing nuts were in a minority, and it was nice to renew a couple of acquaintances. Same time next month?