SEO & Social Media Track

SEO For Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They? – Back in the old days, some SEOs walked through the snow for eight miles and made different versions of their sites for Infoseek, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and others. Each search engine liked different things, and so the effort was deemed worth it, by some. Then came Google, which grew and grew to the degree that for many, it was the only search engine to care about. You built a site for Google and didn’t worry about the rest. Now the times may be changing. When the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is complete — only months away now — Yahoo’s results will be powered by Bing. Suddenly, a second player with an estimated 25-35% marketshare will emerge overnight. Does it make sense to build a Bing-specific site? Is there that much of a difference between ranking factors for Bing versus Google to justify the effort? This panel explores the issues.

Paid Search Track

How’s Your QSO? Quality Score Optimization For Pros – Improve your AdWords quality score and enjoy cheaper prices and better positioning when advertising on Google. It’s that easy. Except it’s not, since how Google calculates quality score remains a mysterious black box to many. Even the paid search experts can find understanding quality score to be a challenge. In this session, quality score optimization advice designed for the pros.

Business Issues Track

Opening The Contracts Kimono: Translating Your Pricing Model To Legal Agreement – Discussions of SEM "pricing models" are mostly theoretical chatter. Putting deals together based on those concepts requires developing contracts, which can be daunting and expensive to perfect. Agencies and independents are highly protective of their contracts, the valuable written instruments that embody actual execution of SEM business models.

Join our panel of successful SEM agency owners and  independents, each prepared to dissect business models of different flavors and distribute some of their shop’s SEO, PPC, ORM, Social Media, NDA, performance-based, other agreements and/or specific paragraphs.  You’ve never attended a session like this. The entire cost of attending SMX Advanced may be justified by one contract or paragraph.

Note: Because of the high value of materials:

• Materials will be distributed only to those who physically attend the session and agree not to redistribute
• Laws differ from state to state; recipients’ attorneys may need to adapt the language as appropriate for their jurisdiction
• Materials are in no way are intended to constitute legal advice, only reference materials regarding how other firms have accomplished various business model objectives.

SEO & Social Media Track

Twitter, Real Time Search & Real Time SEO – Still think Twitter’s a big waste of time? Think again. Tweets are now directly integrated into Google’s main search results. Along with tweets, other real time content is being incorporated into Google and other search engines. This session looks at the fast moving changes in real time search, with a particular look at how the SEO pro should be leveraging Twitter as part of their campaigns.

Paid Search Track

Targeting The Search Funnel – Most people don’t do a search and immediatley buy from a web site. They often research a product over days, weeks or even months, using different search terms from search session-to-session. The panel looks at the search funnel, as Google’s new tool recently renamed the sales funnel. How do you best target people at different points of the funnel using paid search and move them toward your ultimate goal of conversion.

Business Issues Track

Emotional Rescue: What You Need To Know About The B2B Buying Dynamic – SEM businesses – agencies, software vendors, consultants -  sell to other businesses…which evaluate rationally and make sound decisions. Then why did the deal go sour at the 11th hour? How about the  customer oozing buying signals – then suddenly stop returning calls and answering e-mail? Sound familiar? You’re not alone.
 
B2B sales are driven by emotion just as consumer purchases are, according to ground breaking research contained in The Buyersphere: How Business Buys from Business in a Digital Marketplace.
You’ll leave this session knowing:

•  the "marketing funnel" is broken analogy because of the role of emotion plays in B2B buying, and what you can do to mitigate the effects of emotion to become a more successful B2B sales organization;
•  how organizational and person risks affect B2B purchase decisions;
•  what the  overlap is  between "Doers" and "Buyers" in the buying process, and how that dynamic influences decisions ;
•  how online/offline sales best practices contribute to greater success.

SEO & Social Media Track

Show Me The Links: Real Life Link Building – Yes, yes. Do a top 10 list. Got it. Attract links with rewards. Heard that. What else you got when it comes to link building? In this session, link builders share real life stories of how they obtained hard-to-get links. Is it the relationships, stupid? Focusing on what matters? Tips and strategies, for the pros.

Paid Search Track

Pump Up Those Conversions! – You’ve got them to your site — that’s half the battle. Win the war. Convert, convert, convert! Convert them on the landing pages! Guide them past landing page as necessary, converting them deeper in the site. But convert! This session looks at tools, testing and techniques for the advanced search marketer to increase those conversion odds.

Business Issues Track

Raising Capital During & After The Great Recession – The stock market is up and the banking crisis appears over, but that doesn’t mean that funding from sources like VC, private equity and IPOs is flowing. Intrigued about or considering raising capital? This session is for you. Topics include: 

• Reality Check: The Financing Environment for Growth Stage Companies
• Startup Funding: What You Need To Know About Angels and VCs
• Against the Odds – Raising Capital in a Recession

SEO & Social Media Track

The Ultimate Social Media Tools Session – Buckle up for a tour of social media tools that you can use day to day. This session covers free and paid tools, how they work and how best to use them. Specifically, you’ll learn

• How using social media tools will help streamline your work
• How to save time and money using social media tools
• What tools you can use to help find conversations and customers
• How to have tools built on a very small budget, and how to get tools built

Paid Search Track

Test That Ad! – Let’s face it. The creative, when it comes to paid search ad copy, doesn’t give you a lot of room to be creative. You’ve got so little space, so little time your ad will be viewed, that it’s essential that every word counts. You’re testing religiously, right? But can you be testing better? And are there things you should be trying that you might not be aware of? This session aims to educate and surprise even the advanced paid search marketer.

Business Issues Track

Demystifying Online Attribution – Measuring ROI is key to effective online acquisition efforts. When you know what’s working (and what isn’t), you can react quickly. Just as important are the insights online data can give you about your customers: what were they searching for that caused them to buy? Did that display ad make all the difference? Unfortunately, attributing all conversions to the last click is easy to do with current analytics products, yet doing so obscures real customer data and effectiveness measurements. This panel will provide real answers on how to track a customer’s searches through all phases of the buying cycle, how to measure cross channel “assists”, and how to avoid the dangers of last click attribution.

You&A With Matt Cutts
What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking. Don’t miss this popular SMX Advanced tradition!

Keynote Q&A: Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Online Audience Business, Microsoft
Yusuf Mehdi has been instrumental in leading both web search and search advertising initiatives at Microsoft. He currently has revenue and market share responsibility for the Bing and MSN businesses, and before that served as Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist and led an 1,800-person engineering team to develop and launch Microsoft’s initial web search platform and Microsoft adCenter. In this keynote Q&A with Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, he discusses the evolution of search at Microsoft, the alliance with Yahoo and future initiatives Microsoft has planned as it competes with the global goliath, Google.

SEO & Social Media Track

So You Want To Test SEO? – Trying to figure out that search algorithm, to decide which of those 200+ factors really make a difference? You might be tempted to do some experimenting — and you might end up making the wrong conclusions. Are you correcting for personalization? How are blended results having an impact? Is there a different algorithmic blend used for informational queries versus transactional ones? Are you interpreting the results correctly? Do you have control groups? These are only some of the many challenges to running a valid experiment. If you’re going to test, this session aims to help you do it right. It also aims to help you judge the validity of tests run by others. Topics covered include:

• Using the scientific method in SEO: what is a scientific method, why is it important and what parts of it are relevant to the world of SEO testing
• Setting up a valid SEO experiment: testing keyword choice, testing site choice, experiment length, etc.
• Identifying common errors in SEO experiments: interpreting results, statistical analysis, control groups, irrelevant data elimination, lack of parameter isolation, etc.
• What to look for during experimentation
• What are the benefits of testing? Examples of tests and how they affected our SEO strategy
• How to make discoveries part of your SEO work

Paid Search Track

The Mad Scientists Of Paid Search – It’s alive! Mwah ha ha ha! OK, our mad scientists on this panel are far less frightening that those scary ones from B-movies. These scientists have run various paid search experiments aimed at boosting performance of their campaigns. Come see and learn from their creations!

SEO & Vertical Search Track

Location Services: The New Local Search? – Is checking in on Foursquare search? Yes, indeed! That’s because by checking in, people are also often also looking around, checking for tips, advice and information. How are location services like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Gowalla or mobile apps from established local search players like Yelp changing the local search space? This session looks at this dynamic new area and the opportunities for search marketers. Check-in and check it out!

SEO & Social Media Track

Search Marketing In The Facebook Zone – You’re traveling through another dimension. A dimension not of web pages and links but of fan pages and sharing. A journey into a mysterious land where none of the PageRank rules apply. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop, the Facebook Zone! Think there’s no need to go into the zone as a search marketer? Think again. Facebook generates enough internal searches to be classed as a major search engine in its own right. How’s your content ranking there? How are your ads doing? Facebook also spills out into the "real" web, with content showing up at Google and Bing. In this session, hear from advanced search marketers about their explorations of the strange new and important world of Facebook and what you should be doing there.

Paid Search Track

Ads On The Move: Mobile Paid Search – The mobile search space continues to grow — and mobile ad opportunities keep growing alongside. This session reviews some of the latest tips, techniques and strategies for paid search marketers when it comes to mobile search ads in results and in search applications.

SEO & Vertical Search Track

Build It Better: Site Architecture For The Advanced SEO – Think you’ve covered all the on-the-page factors to ensure better rankings? Think again. This session reviews beyond-the-basics areas you should be considering, including one of the hottest new factors to come along — speeding up your site.

SEO & Social Media Track

Mega Session: SEO Vets Take All Comers – This PowerPoint-free panel is made up of veteran search engine optimization experts taking questions on SEO issues. Put your biggest challenges to them and come away with solutions.

Paid Search Track

Amazing PPC Tactics – What’s hot and happening with paid search? This session will wow you with some new ideas for your PPC campaigns!

SEO & Vertical Search Track

What You Don’t Know About You Tube – What’s one of the biggest search engines on the web? YouTube. What feeds much video content directly into the top results of the web’s largest search engine, Google? YouTube. Already feel you’re rocking along just fine with YouTube? Our panel seeks to shake you up and surprise you with video search marketing tips for the service.