Yesterday we attended Sphinncon 2011 at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem. I spoke on a panel about Reputation Management.

This was the best SEO/Internet Marketing event I had been to in Israel. Thanks Barry Schwartz and your team of organizers (RankAbove, TENS, etc)! While I have enjoyed the various other conferences in Israel, I have a feeling that there is now a critical mass of people doing SEO, PPC etc. here in Israel. The level of the discussions was similar to what I have heard at SES shows in the US. Unlike previous conferences, I took at least some notes during several of the lectures and panels.

A few notes I made for myself:

1) Think about utilizing various methods (caching plugins? W3 Total Cache?) to speed up page loads for sites running on Homegrown PHP CMS’s and WordPress.
2) Learn more about Microformats and how these could help us define metadata that could be helpful for identifying our posts, sites, etc. with our clients, their geolocation etc. Especially look into how we can do this for our cell phone websites – tagging pictures of phones, prices, etc.
3) Consider optimizing the intermediate terms in Instant Search – this can be a value add for Rep Management clients
4) There is a way to tag our pages so that when shared on Facebook the right blurb etc. will be pulled.
5) Optimizing and tagging video on our own sites (microformats again) could be a shortcut to better rankings – especially where there is already a video result and we can be the second in a double result.

And now for the important parts…

It was great seeing friends, clients, and colleagues – we should see each other more often!

The food was good! Note for next event: would be a very good idea to serve fruits and vegetables in the afternoon. The cakes and cookies, while tasty caused many to be tired in the late afternoon.
Oh, and while I brought my own wireless router and charged people to use it, it would be good to have Wifi working next time.