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Who would have thunk it? i-Dating and online gambling the perfect marriage. It is if you have someone like Marc Lesnick running this type of event.
Lesnick, who was one of the leading Internet gambling and affiliate conference organizers back in the day and remains a close friend of the Gambling911.com website, has branched out into other industries.
This week’s Internet Dating Conference in Miami Beach may very well be his most successful conference to date, attracting somewhere in the area of 450 attendees.
It’s not the i-Dating aspect that really interests us, though we certainly find it fascinating how this industry is evolving with all those endless television advertisements for niche relationship specialty websites like ChristainSingles.com and OurTime.com (for seniors).
What we here at Gambling911.com loved about this particular conference is that Lesnick, through his vast contacts, has been able to attract high ranking executives from major search engines like Google and Bing.
Yesterday featured an entire session on Search Engine Optimization.
We missed an earlier presentation by Google but were fortunate enough to catch the Bing.com presentation. Every search secret imaginable was offered up by Duane Forrester, who manages Bing Webmaster Tools . He’s also the author of How To Make Money With Your Blog & Turn Clicks Into Customers (find it on Amazon here).
One of the things we learned, and Mr. Forrester pointed out during his PowerPoint presentation, is that i-Dating folks haven’t exactly mastered the fine art of SEO.
i-Dating sites in general tend to focus more on reeling customers in with fancy graphics and onsite advertising than with valuable content. Forrester noted that such content, when even available, typically appears towards the bottom of i-Dating websites.
Original, fresh content is the key to ranking well while a well managed social media program should be a webmasters second priority.
The one thing Bing, and we suspect Google, has caught onto: Sites that buy links, engage in link and ‘like’ farms, will be penalized.
Forrester noted that rival Google recently changed its algorithm and has begun penalizing websites for something we won’t publish here as we would rather encourage interested parties to attend Lesnick’s conferences as a means of gaining access to this invaluable information.
Some of us who arrived ill-prepared without a pen or paper ended up taking notes on 6 pages of scrap sheets (actually they were the backs of speaker evaluation surveys). Thanks to Marc’s new wife Alana (sorry Jenny Woo, he’s now taken) for providing the pen.
Lesnick's conferences tend to be affordable and, with the i-Gaming sector about to become fully legalized in the US, we trust folks will love to spend this week next year in sunny warm (it's 82 degrees here today) Miami Beach as opposed to say, frigid cloudy expensive London. Those all important parties include binge drinking at The W, Clevelander Rooftop Lounge and everyone's favorite tourist trap on Ocean Drive, Mangos. If you can sneak out during sessions, head on over to the beach. It's just three blocks away from the Convention Center.
- Chris Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher
