2008 SES Toronto Conference

One of the major SEO events in Canada took place last month in Toronto, the SES Toronto conference.

The conference was a great opportunity to see and learn about the strategies and techniques being used in the SEO industry nowadays and to get some fresh ideas. Although the quality of the speakers was great, I think the advanced sessions could have been more technical.

Social Networking and Social Media are hot topics that were discussed during many of the sessions. A lot of Internet marketers use this to drive traffic to theirs sites. How do you determine if the campaign was successful? Orion panel: “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World” was an attempt to answer this question. Some parameters are easy to track, like unique visitors and profit. However not all traffic is equal. The main idea was that you need to setup your metrics and measure your success according to your business plan and business strategy. Apparently there is not a universal solution yet.

Topics such as search user behaviour, universal and blended search, getting found on maps and local searches, and tracking social media success, caught a lot of attention. Gordon Hotchkiss talked about the evolution of the “golden triangle” and could not refrain from mentioning how Rogers forgot to buy paid search traffic to support their iPhone announcement in Canada.

SEM Canada is the next big industry event this year. I hope more Canadian businesses will recognize the importance of Internet Marketing and as a result we will see more recognition and more events like SES Toronto in Canada.