The London Perl Workshop is looking frighteningly imminent. It’s on November 25th – that’s less than three weeks away. All across the capital (and even further afield) if you listen hard you will hear the sounds of speakers frantically trying to get their talks ready.
That, at least, is how I have spent my weekend. I’m presenting a new training course at the workshop and I’ve been working hard on the slides for the last couple of days.
This new course is a bit of an experiment for me. It’s a completely Perl-free session. For most of this year, I’ve been working for a well-known property portal and the work I’ve been doing for them has concentrated on search engine optimisation and I’m going to take this opportunity to share some of my new-found knowledge with a room full of people.
I know what you’re thinking. SEO is either a) really dull keyword research or b) snake-oil. To be fair, I’ve seen both of those things, but that’s not what I’m going to be covering. I’d hate to be seen as either boring or a snake-oil salesman!
No, I’m going to be covering something that I think is far more interesting. The course will be all about making your web site more attractive to Google. And if Google likes your web site, they will crawl your site more often, extract more useful information from it and (hopefully) show your site in response to more user search queries. Getting your site to appear in more search results means more visitors and more visitors means a more successful web site.
I won’t be covering anything complicated. There’s nothing that you won’t be able to implement in a couple of hours. Anyone could use these techniques – but the point is that most people don’t. That’s why they work.
The schedule hasn’t been published yet, so I don’t know when I’ll be giving the talk, but I expect to have that information in the next few days. I do know that my slot is 80 minutes – that’s because the organisers have received a large number of high-quality proposals, so we all have to squeeze up a bit to fit in as many of them as possible.
The London Perl Workshop is one of my favourite conferences. The range of talks is always great. And it seems that this year’s workshop (which has a new organising team) is going to be no exception.
Hope to see some of you on 25th November.
