Nottingham Girl Geek Dinner 9/7/07

Another Girl Geek Dinner tonight and I was delighted that Fiz and Alex could come. There was a really good presentation on search engine optimisation by Internet marketing company Hallam.
Susan Hallam gave a really good presentation covering some of the major players in SEO. It was a great refresher as it must be about 5 years since I really focused on SEO, and have relied primarily on good mark up and a decent amount of content to drive Google rankings.
It was great to learn some interesting facts like that while Google occupy about 75% of the UK search engine market, in the US it only takes about 40% with the likes of MSN being major players. Also interesting that the driving force behind this probably tied in to my old job with libraries and there quality of cataloging and metadata and choice of Google as the search engine of choice.

Another thing I learnt was that Google only looks at the first 65 characters in yout title and it ranks them in order. So it's time to start altering my page titles I feel. I knew that it was detremental to have the same title on everypage, but this made me really examine what I used rather than being lazy about it.

The whole presentation was really well delivered and although we had to skim over areas due to time constraints it was really clear that Susan knew her stuff and it was able to support all her opinions with a great deal more than "marketing fluff". My only bone to pick was over her comment that "Flash was bad", which harks back to the Nielsen comment. I'd agree most implementations aren't satisfactory and that is far easier to create "bad flash" than "good". But it's too easy to dismiss it as being bad both in terms of accessibility and SEO. I find it hard to argue that a Flash or Flex UI does not create a richer user experience - so we can't just ignore these technologies but must push and strive for ways to make them more accessible to users and robots alike. I would have loved to have heard about new approaches that can help improve Flash, rather than a flat negative response.

The talk was full of great examples and I felt like I'd been spared a thrashing when she said she'd googled us and was going to use our websites but thought better of it. Perhaps a little too much like shooting fish in a barrel. As a quick look at the new Nottingham Girl Geek Dinners website shows not everyone in the room is up to the title "professional" web designer. Who dragged that out of the 1990's?

In fact overall the geek factor is still sadly missing. I'm not sure whether it is my expectation that is wrong or that the Nottingham dinner is really quite different to the others that are run. But it is still really marketing focused, which is hardly short of women - that generally where all the women in IT firms work, while I still hold out the hope of actually talking to other women developers and designers - I know these are a rarer breed but I thought that was kind of the point.

Now there isn't another one until October! Are we really so lacking in local talent that it takes 3 months to find another speaker?