Post-event: SEMCON Bicol

[Janette Toral]

My sincerest thanks to fellow community member, Alvin Perez, for inviting me to be part of the SEMCON Bicol event held at Aquinas University last February 6. Alvin also announced the event here last month.

I commend educational institutions who makes an effort of bringing updated knowledge to their students, faculty, and the community they serve.

I talked about Search Engine Marketing & Optimization (SEM / SEO) 101 with emphasis on the topic on-page optimization. As the audience was a mixed bunch (students & professionals), I delivered the talk in Filipino most of the time, used the upcoming Valentine's Day and love as analogy in explaining SEO steps.

It was actually my first time to listen to DigitalFilipino club member Gary Viray talk about the topic Link Building Tools, Tactics, and Techniques (off-page optimization). For case study, he used the recent Busby SEO Test competition experience as an example and shared what he did to optimize his site.

I'm glad that despite the technical level of the subject at hand, we manage to make it as understandable as possible and get the audience really interested. We also received interesting questions like how can a penalized page recover, SEO maintenance, lack of visibility on optimized keywords, when is a site considered a spam, when is link building too much that can result to penalty, how to make money through blogs, among others.

Blogger Andrea Karlsan Zapanta also dropped by the event and got updated on the stuff she has been doing. She and Marianne Vergara (who also took photos at the event used here and helped in its organization) met for the first time and realized that they worked for the same SEO company before that closed its shop recently in Legazpi City.

To further support the learning, suggestions were given to Alvin to get students into blogging, post search engine optimized popular content, link build, and even monetize as a subject project.

I was hoping to meet another speaker, Peachy Galias, who was supposed to talk about copywriting. Unfortunately, she got sick and was unable to join us.

Overall, the SEMCON event in Legazpi City was a memorable one. It is one of those rare events where I got challenge, have a tag team speaker to coordinate with for topic synchronization, and working with great organizers Alvin Perez and Marianne Vergara of Aquinas University.

For those who want to learn more, check out the various forum topics related to SEO / SEM.

I shall be updating this post to reflect also the updates made by those who participated. If you have made a post about it, let me know and will link it here. Here are some so far:

* Search Engine Marketing Conference - Bicol (Alvin)
* SEMcon Bicol, the very first event I was part of for 2009 (Marianne)
* SEM Conference in Bicol - A success! (Gary)
* OT: Delayed SEMCon Bicol Post (Andrea)
* Legazpi City as Web Development and SEO Outsourcing Hub (Janette)
* Fun Photography at Cagsawa Ruins (Gary)
* Trip to Mayon Volcano & Mayon Resthouse (Janette)
* Challenging 3 months (Janette)


Find more photos like this on DigitalFilipino.com Social Network
Thank you!

[Janette Toral]

Thanks Marianne. I just posted a comment. Cheers!

[marianne]

Ma'am janette comment posting is already enabled in my blog.. thanks!

[Janette Toral]

Thank you very much Marianne for all the help, patience, and hospitality you have given.. I tried posting a comment at your blog but it seems your template doesn't allow me to. See you in Manila soon!

[marianne]

hi ma'am janette, this is marianne. i have a late post of the SEMcon event in my new blog.

God Bless!