NOTE: This is part 3 of my SES China Experience Series.

People who know me from way back will tell you I’m a closet extrovert. I love meeting new people and hearing their stories. I sometimes appear detached to some but generally, I’m a very friendly guy. That outlook served me well during SES China, which was my first international speaking engagement and my first international networking test. I brought 1,000 business cards with me for the event (kidding, just 200) and I wanted at least 200 business contacts in return. I didn’t quite reach that quota, but as with link building, it’s the quality that counts more.

Here’s a rundown of people I met in Nanjing that made SES China all the more interesting:
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UPDATE: It was a pleasure meeting PICS people like Maan Tolentino, Teodoro Kalaw, Mark Hipolito, Mary Ann Go (Itzamatch.com), Dean Santiago and Annelle Sawaki (AsiaKingWorld.com), as well as SEO Philippines members Mike Abundo, Erwin Oliva (INQ7.net and CyberBaguioBoy), Whynthrop Yu, Fernando Martirez III (Farmout Central) and Jonathan Casuncad (ZimpliHotels). For those interested, I’ve uploaded a copy of my Search Engine Marketing presentation slides for your downloading pleasure.

I’ve been invited by Maan Tolentino, Wynthrop Yu and Mike Abundo of the Philippine Internet Commerce Society (PICS) to give a presentation on search engine marketing 101 later today. This is part of the organization’s celebration of the 12th anniversay of the Philippine Internet.

The Philippine Internet Commerce Society is a non-stock and non-profit, SEC-registered (#A1998-06511) organization that shall:

• Undertake activities to enhance and facilitate on local, regional and national levels the advancement and development of Internet and electronic commerce.
• Serve as the private sector advocate of Internet and electronic commerce.
• Contribute to the advancement of the state-of-the-art Internet and electronic commerce.
• Provide a forum for the dissemination, acquisition, exchange of information on matters of mutual interest to its members as well as for the discussion of their common problems relating to Internet and electronic commerce.

Venue: Zobel Room, Makati Sports Club, Salcedo Village, Makati City
Time: 8:00 PM

But we already know that. I used to tackle the issue from a SEM/monetization standpoint, but according to Andy Hagans, there are simpler reasons to avoid the blog bandwagon:
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Two quick lessons I picked up over dinner during SES China deal with article and press release optimization. They’re both good at building traffic and linkages to your site. I’ve already dabbled in article submissions before but on a very small scale via SEOPapers.com. I haven’t tried press releases for the simple reason that I didn’t have press releases to push. I’m trying my hand at it now. Just the free ones mind you. The paid PR submission sites cost a lot.

Lee Odden has a nice list of PR submission sites. I’m still waiting for Miles to send his article submission list :)

NOTE: This is part 2 of my SES China Experience Series.

After packing my things Wednesday night, I went straight to bed. Three hours would be more than enough I thought. I woke up around 4:00 AM and arrived at the old Manila international airport around 5:00 AM. The Cathay Pacific check-in queue was long. While waiting in line, something dawned on me. In my rush to reach the airport, I forgot the one thing everyone was reminding me to bring along: a nice, thick jacket to fight the unforgiving Chinese climate. I wanted to ask someone at home to bring the jacket over but I convinced myself that I would be alright. It would be summer there soon and it shouldn’t be colder than Tagaytay. That’s what I honestly thought. Mistake #2.
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Search Engine Strategies China

I’m finally back in Manila after 4 days of Search Engine Strategies fun in Nanjing, China. SES was everything I imagined it would be…and more. Here’s my China story.
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Here’s a copy of the presentation slides I used for my linkbaiting speech in SES China. If you have problems downloading, let me know. Send me an email at marc@macalua.com and I’ll send you a copy through email.
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I’m here at Nanjing, China for the SES Conference. Blog posts here will be sparse. Hope on over to Search Engine Roundtable for my continuing coverage of SES China 2006.

It’s f*cking cold here! :(

I got caught in Jim Boykin’s Flashbacks on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and more post and went digging Google.com circa December 2, 1998.

One of the pages that caught my eye was the Why Use Google page. Very nice retro read. You can’t find a live copy in Google.com now, so this artifact should be a good read for search historians and newbies alike.
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Attention whores. This is what Chris Garrett calls people who deliberately bait A-listers to their blogs.

I am not knocking bloggers for wanting to be famous. Personally I would rather have a popular blog and be personally relatively unknown, but hey whatever floats your boat. What I do take objection to is when people write posts specifically and only to get an A-List bloggers attention. (This is why in this post I will not mention any bloggers by name, heh). This says to me that they would rather ignore their real audience to achieve an audience of one.

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