Best of SMX Israel 2013

Best lines and lessons

Roi Ben Ami:

• Females always win. [Discussing A/B test results regarding male vs female faces on landing pages]
• Successful landing pages help the user paint the picture of what happens after the conversion.

Uri Breitman: If you delete a site, you have to shift delete it. You can’t redirect its pages to a new domain. [Asked about deleting a site hit by Penguin and redirecting the pages].

Shira Abel:

• It takes about ten times of hearing about a brand till you trust it. That’s why social works and why it’s so hard to track.
• Long term sales require long term relationships.

Eli Feldblum: Don’t use WordPress category or tag pages. Create static pages with in-context links to the pages in the category.

Kelli Brown: Fans brought in because you offered a free iPad are as bad as bought likes. Fans not engaging prevent real fans from seeing content.

Jon Burg: Start with business objectives, not social objectives. For $5 you can get 1,000 Twitter followers and it’s a really bad idea and it will hurt you in the end. Follower count is just a number. What are your business objectives?

Gil Reich: So Google’s demo for Google Glass has the perfect date for geeks or Orthodox Jews. The guy gets to play the ukulele for the cute girl and show her the sunset over the Hudson River through his glasses. All the benefits of dating a cute girl without any of the ickiness involved with physical proximity.

Best stats

Paul Vesely: 1 in 5 users bought something using a smartphone over Thanksgiving 2012.

Kalman Labovitch: 8 of 10 schema.org implementations we saw from our client were wrong. And they still brought a significant increase in search traffic.

Ophir Cohen: Our schema.org implementations brought a 50% increase in traffic.

Best unrelated tip

Eli Feldblum and an unidentified audience member saved a presenter by telling him that Ctrl+Shift+T reopens your last closed tabs in Google Chrome. Who knew?

Best Tweets

Yuval Wirzberger ‏@GrooveInfoTech: Psyched for #smxisrael … hmmm what to wear? Just kidding, im a guy. See u there 🙂

Sara ‏@sarabcole: Gotta check that none of the speakers or their methods are messing with my site. [After the ‘Aggressive SEO’ session]

Hat tips

Special thanks to Hadassah Levy for her SMX Tweets and Kahena Digital for their SMX live blog.

Also see …

Great round up by Ronit Epstein at 3 Door Digital: 121 tips from #SMX Israel 2013

The best of other great search conferences.