Day 2 at OJObuscador was quite different from Day 1, which was all about the search engines and what they have planned for 2007. Day 2 was all about i) organic positioning; ii) marketing online; and iii) i.r. / usability. I generally found the Day 2 conferences to be informative but lower on the “wow” factor.

My general impressions:

• Javi Casares seems to always be in a good mood, even as he is running a pressure-filled conference with hundreds of attendees. That’s to be commended, as was the quality of the OJObuscador conference.
• The SEO/SEM market in Spain is in a very early state of development, and neither Spanish companies nor Spanish users are pressuring SEOs to improve. Spanish companies are generally waking up to the marketing opportunities presented by the Internet, but they are more accustomed to SEM-type approaches (a fixed budget for short-term results) than to SEO (optimizing a site for mid-to-long term benefit). But even if an SEM approach is chosen, a lot of companies might waste money on overly simplistic SEM campaigns that fail to monitor actively the campaign’s return on investment (ROI) or otherwise track the campaign’s success. So Google gets rich, but maybe your company doesn’t get the exposure it needs/deserves/has paid to get. On the other hand, Spanish users are not as demanding as users in other countries, which means that in general the Spanish SEO/SEM market is not as dynamic and professional as it could be–the bar is a lot lower.
• The best way to guarantee an SEO/SEM’s ability to hit your targets is to request a list of past sites on which he or she has worked. Otherwise, you might pay someone a lot of $$ but not get useful results.
• If you ever want to hire an SEO/SEM specialist, do a search and see how prominently the specialist shows up in various search engines. A supposed SEO/SEM expert should know how to be listed on the first page of Google and the other major search engines. If your expert doesn’t rank properly, ditch him.