The Isulong SEOPH Awarding Night

Published in

racoma.org

6 min readOct 4, 2006

I was unable to post about the Isulong SEOPH awarding night earlier because of the extended power outage we had in our part of town. I thought power would’ve already been restored, but it turns out we lost power again after coming back home, and it wouldn’t return until two days after.

Caren and I generally had a good time, save for some not-so-pleasant observations of some people (don’t ask). The food and refreshments were okay (Jason treated me to a pre-event beer. Thanks Jason!), but the venue was a bit cramped. I think Marc wanted people to have more intimate space to interact, so he chose not to set the event up at a larger place.

One big hitch was that the WiFi signal at the upstairs location was so weak people had a difficult time connecting. And we were supposed to have been able to do a live Google search to see the rankings by 8:00 p.m.! But I had no qualms about not having access, even if I had been out of the grid for several days already.

Of course, the best part was having to meet all the interesting people, and the interseting — and potentially profitable — conversations that ensued. There were the old faces, like my colleague Jason, fellow pro- and non-pro bloggers Abe Olandres, Anton Diaz, Jayvee Fernandez, Marc Macalua, Noel Bautista, Markku Seguerra, and Mike Abundo, among others. And there were also new faces, like Wilson Chua of Bitstop, Arnold Alvarez, Benj Arriola of YDS, Mike Lopez of Transinnova, and Michael Turner of Harvest SEO.

Mingling With the Crowd

Again, I would like to highlight that in events like this, it’s best to keep your laptop in your bag and get to meet and greet with the people, instead. Talk now, blog later, as I told Wilson Chua. It’s in the conferences where it’s generally okay to live-blog or to go online for something else. But the Isulong SEOPH was a social event. And by social events, I mean those things you go to to both meet-and-greet both for pleasure and business.

The night saw a mixed crowd gather for one event. It was unlike the blogger conference held a few days prior to the Isulong SEOPH awarding (Monday last week) since the SEO-PH members were not all bloggers. I’d say only about 50% of the attendees were bloggers or ran blogs, but most were into SEO one way or another, whether as their business, profession, passion, or hobby. When you’re in the business of earning from your online activities, after all, you would have to do some amount of SEO.

So what did we learn about SEO?

Michael Turner blogs that linkbuilding is still king. Marc “provides a recap here,”:http://www.macalua.com/2006/10/03/isulong-seoph-winners/ with a list of winners and links to some photos.

It was good enough for “our Go-Ogle! team”:http://www.go-ogle.com.ph/isulong-seoph to get the fifth place win For SEO n00bs like us, any frontpage finish would’ve been satisfactory. Thing is, the first placer Gio Castro was admittedly even a more inexperienced SEO.

So what does this tell us about the contest and SEO in general? IMHO, while SEO has been brought to the limelight lately, SEO is still not an exact science. And it can be an iffy business, too. And this is especially so, with the search engines featuring ever-so-secret and ever-evolving algorithms for ranking websites.

I gotta hand it to the SEO pros, though, for being innovative and forward-thinking enough to still be successful in this field even with the uncertainties.

Controversy!

And here’s something else I learned. Some people are still so old school when it comes to SEO and search engine marketing. JNB Web Promotion, which signed on as a sponsor, suddenly backed out at the last minute, citing that it was disappointed that 9 out of the 10 frontpage placers were blogs, and that the company would rather not hire blog “spammers n jammers” as SEO pros. Such a derogatory stand, in my opinion. I tend to think blogs are an excellent way to drive traffic and improve search engine rankings as a compliment to a regular website. Maybe JNB Web Promotion was afraid it would be driven out of business if companies discovered how to optimize for the search engines themselves.

I hear WordPress does such a good job at optimizing, with its semantic markup and the automatic pinging to notification services. Maybe this is another good reason for using WP as a CMS.

Photos

And here are the photos, at last. My batteries were running out of juice that evening, so I didn’t take much flash photography. A little increase in ISO rating and a steady hand hopefully helped in capturing steady, albeit noisy, images.

Bitstop’s Wilson Chua with his daughter/”chaperone”

Abel and Jason

Photographing the photographers. Anton Diaz (2nd from left), Benj Arriola (3rd), Michael Turner (right). I’m sorry I wasn’t able to catch the others’ names.