Yesterday, Matt and I hit up the Houston Interactive Marketing Association’s Interactive Strategies Conference at the Angelika Theater downtown. The event ended up being an awesome learning experience, which means good news for our clients.

We stayed in the SEO/SEM track for the entire day and heard four top search engine-marketing gurus spill on vertical search, SEO for sites, tech tools, web design for ROI, and more. We plan on taking our new knowledge and giving it straight back to clients by making our web sites even more findable and user-friendly.

By far, our favorite session had to be the SEO Site Clinic, in which Tony Wright of Wright IMC looked at audience members’ web sites and ripped them apart from an SEM expert’s perspective. We offered up houstonnewcomerguides.com and were luckily chosen. Even better, Tony had a hard time finding something wrong with the site… at first.

He gave Matt some great pointers on internal things that will speed up load time and on ways to use title tags to target search terms we weren’t grabbing. These pointers of course were not exclusive to houstonnewcomerguides.com, and we will now be keeping them in mind on every site we build. Other than those few pointers, we got lots of praise on the design and content as well as for reaching the number 1 spot on Google, which should tell us and you that we are definitely doing something right.

We were very excited to attend the conference and will definitely continue to learn. With the ever-changing dynamics of the web in mind, the fundamental philosophies of Poetic Systems push us to never get stuck in a technological rut and to keep flexible with the times. The only way to know where to go next is to stay in the loop.

On a sort-of related note – look for our booth today at the Houston Area Real Estate Convention at the Reliant Arena. Observation of irony: I can’t seem to find the convention on Google!