A few of the talks that I’m particularly interested in are
‘Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues’ and ‘Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Mentions Online’. Brian Turner on his forum always provides quality posts so it’ll be more than interesting to hear what he has to say on ‘Beyond Linkbait’ as well as the rest of the panel.

Richard Baxter is another UK SEO whose blog I’ve been reading over the last few month. It makes for good reading so no doubt his talk on ‘Dynamic Websites: Beyond the Basics’ will be insightful although it does clash with ‘Local Search Marketing Tactics’ which is an area that appeals as well.

Brand & Reputation Management is another talk that stands out as one not to miss.

It’ll be interesting to see how much of the talks cover old ground found on blogs, forums and websites. Hopefully there’ll be plenty of fresh content, ideas and contacts to be made to make up for the rather large admission fee!

See you there.

Venue: Harbour Master Dublin
Date: Saturday August 9th
Time: 8.00 PM

The meetup is a great opportunity to chat and make friends with people who are involved to some extent in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing, web development and web design and share a few drinks with them.

I’ll be more than likely getting the 16.10 Translink train down so if there’s anyone from Belfast that fancies it drop me a line.

If anyone wants to share their experiences and give me any tips about the following then I’m all ears.

• Local Business Results
• Video
• Social Media optimisation

One other thing that puzzles me is why are there twitterings on the site? What has ‘Listening to the specials dub mix of ghost town’ got to do with a multimedia tradeshow in Belfast?

Anyway if you’re a web designer, graphic design, motion designer or whatever it might be worth the visit. Good luck to the organisers for their initiative and I hope it’s a resounding success.

For more details check out the website.

Ramada Hotel Wednesday 11th June, Shaw’s Bridge Belfast £95+VAT (all day).

Topics amongst other things include:

• Blogging and Blogging platforms
• RSS feeds
• SEO
• Social Media
• Market Research

The event is being sponsored by InvestNI and no doubt some of the bigger development and marketing companies will be attending. Should be interesting, and hopefully I’ll have something to report back on.

You can read more on it here.

**** Updated ****

Apart from a very warm squashed room the seminar was enjoyable and provided plenty of food for thought. Jeff from Quadraconsulting gave the presentation.

Blogs, blogging platforms and the benefits of blogging obviously took up much of the presentation. Blogs give website owners the opportunity to engage and create an online relationship with their readers. Nothing out of the ordinary here, though I’m far from convinced that every site should have a blog or that existing static sites should move over to a blog/cms platform.

Very quick skim over SEO, touched on inbound links, keyword targeted sites, title tags, and anchor text, and importance of content. Nothing out of the ordinary here apart from the 303 redirect, (What’s that all about?), might have been nice to spend a bit more time on this subject and have a few examples for those in the room that don’t know what anchor text is or how SEO can benefit your business, but time constraints no doubt.

Page Rank isn’t the holy grail of search engine rankings. The higher the PR doesn’t necessarily mean the higher you’ll finish up the Google rankings. Might be a factor though a quick search on Google for a specific phrase will provide plenty of evidence of pages with less PR being returned higher up the rankings. No point in having a high PR if your site isn’t delivering targeted traffic from search engines.

Social networks such as Facebook again were covered as another method of online engagement. Not something I’m heavily into but I can definitely see the benefits of targeted groups and networks, though hasn’t this always been the case.

There was very little on Google Adwords and the benefits of Adwords. Might have been nice to cover this in a bit more detail. Keyword research was covered and Google Adwords as a great keyword research tool wasn’t mentioned. I can find out plenty on competition, market research, keywords, keyword usage that some of the other tools don’t give.

Venue: Harbour Master Dublin
Date: Saturday February 9th
Time: 7.30PM

Some of Ireland’s greatest criminal minds in Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing and web design/development shall be in attendance, and there’s even a warm-up event if you like your rugby.

Below are some of the speakers already signed up for the event.

Cormac Moylan
Dave Davis – Redfly Marketing
Louie – Eire Web Design
Richard Hearne – Redcardinal
James Larkin – Forbairt Media
Allistar – Logon
Eoghan McCabe
Gavin – Ireland SEO & Marketing
Ken Stanley
Gavin Doolan
David Behan

If you’re attending and want a quick mention then let me know.

Now I’ve just gotta convince the wife it’s strictly a business networking event and not a pub crawl.

You can read more of the details on IWF.