Irish IWTC Conference 2008

So readers of the blog will know that Michael and I were invited to attend and speak about SEO (search engine optimisation) at the Irish IWTC Conference in Dublin on Friday 29 March 2008, and we really enjoyed ourselves – at the conference and during the following 12 hours (until 5AM) we spent in the Dublin Temple Bar area doing… er… research on the national tipple with Andy from a certain car leasing company

A big thanks to Martha Rotter at Microsoft Ireland for the invite and to Director Barry Alistair of IrishDev.com (with a special shout out to Support Services Manager Patricia McGill who organised things for us when we got to Ireland). My only regret was that we couldn’t attend earlier sessions in the week on subjects like web accessibility and blogging, both of which I have a keen interest in.

In an intimate session, the powerpoint presentation Michael was up all night making went right out the window and it degenerated into a quickfire question and answer session that I thoroughly enjoyed, and the feedback we received since was very positive. In fact so positive, I think we’ll be leaving the powerpoint presentation at home at the next conference and just get stuck in – I’m a seo, not a professional powerpoint presenter – I hate powerpoint and much prefer the Q&A conference sessions – in fact – decision made – no more Powerpoint (or at least a lot less of it!).

An apology to the audience because in the end I just had to fold my laptop away and push off without putting up the last slide with the web addresses of the sites and tools I recommended (apart from the Hobo blog of course) were worth investing a fair bit of time reading, although I know I mentioned them all during the presentation – so here we go:

• SEOmoz – especially Search Engine Ranking Factors and the SEO Tools
• Wiep Knol SEO Blog – especially Link Value Factors
• Jim Boykin – Just about everything on his link building blog and keep in mind the Internet Marketing Ninja Program for dedicated future seo in the audience!
• Aaron Wall’s SEOBook Blog & SEO Tools
• Brett Tabke’s Google Webmasterworld
• Search Engine Land & Sphinn
• Search Engine People have just posted a great post on Free Keyword Research Tools
• Most of the better seo blogs also appear on the TopRank BigList Of Search Marketing Blogs and are worth reading too

Hope you all found the conference session on seo as enjoyable to attend as I did speaking.

Written by Shaun Anderson Hobo