eBay DevCon 2009

4 presentations in 2 weeks

I recently posted on my presentation on the Jane & Robot developers session last week, which was awesome. Today I had the fourth presentation in a more public setting in two weeks.

Two weeks ago I was sitting on a panel on the special In-House SEO day on SMX Advanced, then last week on Friday I presented some eBay SEO tricks on the Jane & Robot SEO developers day, yesterday I presented a SEO session on the ePN affiliate day, and today I was planned for a SEO session on eBay Dev Con 09. Pretty excited.

Finally I have arrived as a speaker at eBay Dev Con. I always wanted to speak on a developers conference. As I’m just getting my feet wet on the developers side, I was looking forward to all teh feedback people might have. And speaking in front of a crowd is always exciting, as you have the chance of getting valuable feedback on style, story and presentation.

I have some great friends who have put me here. I always enjoy catching up with them, and looking forward working even closer with them in the future.

The Dev Con presentation went pretty well. I had to rewrite my whole presentation, as all teh slides are posted online as well. You can find my deck here: Dennis Goedegebuure on SEO eBay DevCon09.

Something I always wanted to do, is make a picture from the stage of the crowd in the audience. The picture below here was made before all the people were in the room. I was thinking of making it an integrated part of my story, but I only had 50 minutes for my talk, plus the Q&A!

In the front was Richard, the eBayInkBlog blogger. It was great to have a friend in the front who I could pick on. Always helpful to have friendly faces in the audience. Richard was also tweeting live from my session. Some more tweets were pretty positive:

For the rest of the day I’m going to enjoy eBay Dev Con, as I won’t be here tomorrow. The beer bash has already started, so I better grab a beer, and start talking with all the wonderful people here and hear their horror coding stories. This post will be updated later on with more pictures and content.

Just make sure you follow the tweets from Richard @ebayinkblog or the hashtag #ebaydevcon, or read the follow up on eBayInkBlog.

eBay DevCon 09 Beer Bash

No Dutch beer on the Beer Bash, which is my “only” complaint for the organization. Delyn did a fantastic job! There were a lot of different countries represented with both food and beer. Local beer from

• Japan, Sapporo;
• Australia; Fosters;
• Germany; Heifenweisser;
• Mexico; Tecate;

Mini hamburgers from California

At least the Dutch provided the ice cream, with a lot of LOL. Ok, only the ice cream cart is from Ola…a Dutch brand.

Freshly made sushi

And some old and current colleagues

Cheese, Ben & Jerry’s Ice cream, and German sausages…

Hopefully I can present next year again on eBay Dev Con, and stay all days.

Update: There is a good short write up on my presentation on the eBay developers blog by Ashish Kumar:

Search Engine Optimization Presented by Dennis Goedegebuure, SEO Manager, eBay, dennis.goedegebuure@ebay.com.
Dennis Goedegebuure, head of the Natural search Engine team at eBay gave us a great presentation on SEO, its trends and Best practices . A few important points to remember from this presentation are:

• What is SEO – One of the way to get free traffic, more visitors, downloads, transaction and be successful.
• How do search engines work – Do best so that Search Crawlers sees you. Good extractable link structure and content, text only versions of the pages are the Key to your success!
• Ranking factors – L..U..M..P..S is the SEO mantra which stands for Links, URL, Meta Content, Page content and Site maps in your website. Links to discover to your website, Meaningful URLs, Keywords in the URL, Avoid long URLs, Description and keywors in the meta tag, Contents in HTML, ALT text, Relevant text around the images are some of the key factors.
• Free Tools – Submit Search Engine Web Tools using Google webmaster Tools: www.google.com/webmasters/, Yahoo Site Explorer: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com, Bing Webmaster Center: www.bing.com/webmaster See how search engines crawl your site by using Web Developer Toolbar and Keyword Research Tools Google Insight for,Search, Free keyword tool.

And also some initial feedback:

Overall this was a great session ! With almost full attendance, Dennis made this session very interesting and interactive. Good questions were asked during the session and it was answered well by Dennis. I saw lot of attendees surrounding Dennis outside the Fireside ABC meeting room and showing interest even after the session ended. I am glad that i attended this session.