Impressions from the first “SEO conference 2009” and awaiting Webit during fall.

Ivan Petkov

Beginning. Saying that internet is an integral part of our everyday lives is the same as saying that the water is wet. We got so used to the global network, that a part of it is a virtual copy of our lives. Behind this internet experience there are many new and unknown for the simple user topics. One of them is the subject of this article.

Who, where, when? On April 10^th, the first of its kind event was organized in Bulgaria – “SEO conference 2009,” which gathered professionals, developers, bloggers, and internet enthusiasts in one place. They discussed the newest trends in this interesting field of the global network. The conference was organized by famous figures in the field like Ognyan Mladenov, Plamen, Tomov, GEO, Martin Hristov, Martin Popov, Lili Grozeva, Stanislav Dimitrov, who were also the lecturers. They presented the different topics of the conference in an interesting way and with the sense of humor.

SEO? In English, please! Probably by now you are asking yourself what SEO means. It is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization and basically it provides a choice of techniques, with which a website can position itself better in the results of search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, Live Search, etc, which alternatively brings more users to the website and makes it more popular. The optimizers themselves say that they are experimenters by spirit, who needs to constantly adjust to new conditions and learn. Google’s algorithm, which is an undoubted leader in search engine usability in Bulgaria, changes 400 times per year and most of those changes are not even announced. This makes 1 to 2 changes per day!

SEO for humans or machines? The programs, which track the renewal of website content and its indexing are called “crawlers.” So actually, every optimization is done for those crawlers. Some say that whatever is good for them is also good for the users. Others say that it should be written for people not for crawlers. Actually the truth is in the middle – without a unique and current content, even the best optimized website cannot hold users interested and on the other hand without optimization for search engines, even the most interesting and useful content cannot find its target audience. As they say in the SEO field: “Content is king” but they also advise “Write for people, optimize for search engines!”