As part of their commitment to continuing education in the web development industry, a local web design company took part in a conference that focused on search engine marketing.

Harbor Springs Web Design attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto, Canada on May 11 and 12, which is the premier event for search engine marketing and optimization. The purpose of the two-day conference was to educate web designers on how to best maximize search engine marketing for their clients and to gain insight to the latest search developments and solutions.

“Our purpose for attending this conference was to help increase exposure and rankings in the search engines for all of our clients," stated Dickson, partner with Harbor Springs Web Design. "This conference turned out to be invaluable in regard to growing our search engine knowledge base and for the additional online marketing services we can now offer."

Organized by search authority Chris Sherman, the seminars focused on growing a business through search engine marketing, plus top experts from around the globe presented the ins-and-outs of search engine marketing. Many of the speakers were representatives from the search engines themselves, including Jen Fitzpatrick, Director of Engineering at Google and Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Search.

The company attended sessions covering topics such as creating search engine friendly web sites and optimizing Flash presentations for the web, and they also had an opportunity to meet representatives from the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.

“Because of the web services that Cindy is developing, the most informative session that she attended focused on creating dynamic web sites that are search engine-friendly,” said Szczubelek, partner with Harbor Springs Web Design. “Cindy has been working with database development for our clients and we want to make sure their web sites rank well in a search.”

Web sites that are database-driven tend to be “invisible” to crawler-based search engines, which results in the web sites ranking poorly in a search, or not ranking at all.

“This session provided solutions on developing a database-driven web site that is functional and will also rank well on the search engines,” continued Szczubelek.

The conference also gave the company many opportunities to network with fellow web design companies from around the world.

“We were able to share our concerns regarding search engine marketing trends with other people in our industry,” continued Dickson.

“We are confident that we can continue to offer web design services that will meet today’s standards for search engine optimization marketing,” added Szczubelek. “We’re in an industry that changes constantly so ongoing education is a requirement to be successful.”

Harbor Springs Web Design offers affordable web design services and has an office at 373 E. Main Street in downtown Harbor Springs. Visit them online - http://www.harborspringswebdesign.com.