I know this is way overdue, but I actually have to work sometimes. So apologies.I already wrote a general overview of SphinnCon Israel. The next four posts will cover the sessions, and the information that I thought was most interesting and useful. Barry Schwartz from Rusty Brick and Search Engine Roundtable kicked off the event with an introductory presentation. He explained that he was here for his nephew's bar mitzvah, and the event was planned around that. So a big thanks to his nephew for being born 13 ...

As I wrote a few days ago, SphinnCon came to Israel this week on February 5 in the form of SphinnCon Israel. It turns out that this wasn't only the first SphinnCon in Israel, but it was the first SphinnCon ever! So, this is yet another example of a first for Israel, kind of like how the first WordPress conference, WordCamp, to take place outside of the US took place in Israel. I took extensive notes at each session, which I had planned to ...

SphinnCon Israel is sold out! SphinnCon Israel is a SphinnCon networking event focused on search and internet marketing, and is taking place this coming Tuesday, February 5 at the Jerusalem College of Technology (also known as Machon Lev). This event is exciting thanks to the incredible lineup, with representatives from well-known international companies like Google, TechCrunch, Kenshoo and Yedda (see my previous interview with Yedda's Lior Haner, who will be speaking at the conference), and thanks to the location: Jerusalem! For once I don't have ...

Yes, we've revamped our website, and it's about time! If you're reading this in a feed reader, come on over and check it out. Our old site was divided into two parts: one part was a static site built on old-fashioned HTML, and the second part was the blog, sitting separately on WordPress. There were a few problems with that setup: Updating the static site was not fun, especially if we needed to update elements that were repeated across the site, like the navigation bar, or the footer. The blog should have been tied into the site for better search engine results. The blog was sitting on a really old version of WordPress. It was the old story of ...

This past Thursday, our new media site, israelplug, reached digg's home page. As we watched in disbelief, tens of thousands of readers flooded our site (and brought it crashing down in the classic "digg effect"). This was both exciting and frustrating. We learned a lot from this experience, and I would like to share some of these lessons with you. First, here's some background: we started to officially launch our new site on Thursday. As part of our launch strategy, we began to bookmark articles on the major social media sites, including digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. Within minutes, one of our articles was picked up by diggers and the number of ...