Yesterday I went to a little seminar organized by Canada Israel Chamber of Commerce (CICC) called “The Power of Search Engine Markering.”  Couple of weeks ago I didn’t even know that CICC existed, by a fluke I saw the ad in Shalom Toronto. While I found a seminar to be a basic overview more targeted to people who are unfamiliar to the concept there are some ideas I walked out with. 

First presenter was Maor Daniel - he is head of marketing of Yahoo Canada. Here are some memorable points:

• Canada is second only to Korea to internet usage in the world. Israel is third.
• the future of SEM is cost per aquisition. Meaning that advertisers will only pay when the actually reach their conversion goal and not just for a click. If Yahoo would be able implement that I am sure that would turn an idustry upside down. Basically, it means that you pay and get a sale for sure
• in the future the bots would able to index videos and I assuming the same goes for the photos. I wonder how much of computer resourses that would demand

Second was Jim Ben Simon - he is a CEO of Searchlinqs.  I couldn’t find his profile online so I am just linking to his business. He was presented as a proffesional in SEM and was recognized by Maor as one of the few SEM companies they work with in Canada. Jim’s points I found interesting:

• even though Google is a major player you can’t close your eyes on Yahoo and MSN since they are portals. He provided some real life cases and during to fast scan it looked to me that the conversion rate from Yahoo searches is twice as high than from Google. Does it mean that when you are a small business with very limited budget you might as well just stick with Yahoo since it will give you the biggest ROI?
• In of his campaigns for Aeroplan his firm used 4000 keywords. That is freaking a lot! He mentioned that on average they don’t use less than 300 keywords per campaign. I find it hard to wrap my mind around it. I am going to try and use kewords software over the weekend and see if I come up with at least 100 keywords. I always thought that the best is to pick a couple of keywords and just try to master those.

Third one was Dvir Weininiger - SEO Specialist, CMS Buffet. I found out that Dvir was actually the one that gave the most practical advice out of all three:

• He said a really cool phrase: Don’t show bots what you don’t show humans and don’t show humans what you don’t show bots. Takes a second to absorb, but it makes a lot of sense. I think the bottom line is make a real usefull site for you users and don’t just try to use some techniques to get your site at the top
• He said that after a year of his services your site will be in the first 30 positions and will stay there, so you won’t need his services anymore or you could expand more. I wonder if that is true? I find that search engines evolve their algorithms all the time and to stay at the top I would assume a business need to publish a regular content.
• He said that the next thing is optimization of the webpage to be used on cellphones. What  a bright though, I agreed immediatly. There countless number of times when I tried to get some essential info on the go from my blackberry and it was a pain. Certainly, there is an Iphone, but the battery on is just not sufficient for high perfornance business users. 

Overall it was a great evening and opportunity for networking. I was really in a rush, so I didn’t take advantage of it fully. However, I would suggest anyone who wants to dive into the business circle of Toronto especially if involved Israel to attend CICC events.