SphinnCon Israel 2008

SphinnCon is a new conference series led by Barry Schwartz, CEO of Rusty Brick, Executive Editor of Search Engine Roundtable, and News Editor of Search Engine Land.

SphinnCon hosted the first ever organized SEO conference in Jerusalem Israel on Tuesday, February 5, 2008. I would like to give a special thanks to Barry Schwartz for giving us all a great excuse to visit Israel, as well as for running and moderating the event. I would also like to thank my friends at RankAbove and to all the attendees for making the conference a success. I met some wonderful SEOs from around the world and all in all it was a fabulous time.

The Jerusalem College of Technology, in the Givat Mordechai neighborhood of Jerusalem, graciously donated the event space. After Dr. Avi Kay from the College gave the introductory speech, the first SEO panel spoke about paid links and penalties. Branko Rihtman of Tens Technology gave an insightful and detailed presentation, after which was a Q&A session with Ophir Cohen (CEO of CompuCall), Sam Michelson (FiveBlocks) and Gilad Sasson (nekuda.co.il).

I spoke at the second panel on the topic of rising CPC prices and how to mitigate the effects of keyword inflation. Check out my Power Point Presentation here for an outline of the points I covered. The Q&A portion of my panel included Itai Levitan (EasyNet), Alon Sheafer (Kenshoo), Michael Samet (PriceQuotes.com) and Tal Cohen of Google Israel.

Next up was the SMO panel led by Eli Feldblum of RankAbove. He spoke in great detail, citing case studies to prove the importance of Social Media. SMO panelists included Tzvika Avnery (Tagadam), Roi Carthy (TechCrunch) and Lior Hener (Yedda).

After the panelists finished speaking, time was allocated for more networking. I think that everyone gained a deeper insight into the various topics that were discussed, and everyone was in good spirits for being in Israel! I overheard talk about a possible SphinnCon Tel Aviv next year.

And of course, no SEO conference would be complete without the sponsors hosting the after party! We all partied it up at Hatachana Bar in Tel Aviv, thanks to K-Logic and eToro, which was awesome!