The SMX East 2012 Agenda will be available in July.

Just fill out the form below and we’ll let you know when it’s posted!

SMX East 2012 – Session Descriptions Sneak Peek

The final SMX East 2012 agenda will vary from this sneak peek. This sample agenda will give you a good idea of what we may cover.

Links to subject areas we’ll present are below. Click on those links to go to your are of interest or browse the entire sneak peak ageanda. And, don’t forget to complete the form above to be notified when the final agenda’s posted.

SMX Boot Camp Track

Keyword Research Tools & Techniques – The first step to success of any marketing campaign is to know your message. With search marketing, that means knowing the search terms that are being used by your target audience. Understand what they’re searching for, and you can tune-in to their traffic via search engines. This session covers tools and techniques for performing keyword research.

Link Building Fundamentals
Ever since Google created PageRank more than a decade ago, every good search marketer’s motto has been “I link, therefore I am.” They’re important! Though linking seems easy, it’s a far more subtle art than most realize, and there are right and wrong ways to conduct your linking campaign. Not only that, since Google’s Panda updates and its introduction of Google Plus Your World, the type of links that are important have changed. In this session, we’ll look at how to reach out and get quality links, how to craft anchor text to build authority, and how to avoid commonplace mistakes that will hurt your web credibility (and search engine rankings).

Paid Search Fundamentals – Paid search allows you to generate traffic from search engines by purchasing ads, usually on a cost-per-click (CPC) / pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This session covers the basics of how to purchase placement from the major search engines, including best practices for success with your ads.

Search Engine Friendly Web Design – “I’m not designing my site for search engines,” is a common designer objection to SEO suggestions. But if search engines have problems “understanding” your site, either due to technical issues or because your content is presented in “confusing” ways, they will never be able to provide you with those precious top rankings. This presentation focuses on how to strike the perfect balance between appealing to your human readers and accommodating the technical needs of the search engines.

SEO Track

The Periodic Table Of SEO: 2012 Edition
We introduced the Periodic Table Of SEO last spring. Since then, new elements have been discovered, such as a penalty for pages top-heavy with ads or boosts for being in Google+. Meanwhile, Google warns that an “over-optimization” penalty may be coming.

Learn the new ranking factors you must pay attention to at this session. Your SEO success may depend on it!

Link Building: Why You’re Doing It Wrong – Face it: even though link building is one of the most important things you can do to achieve search engine visibility, it’s also one of the most mind-numbing SEO tasks. And the truth is, most link building “best practices” are either wrong or don’t work anymore. In this session, our panelists skewer some link building sacred truths and share techniques that actually work, rewarding you with more than a pounding headache.

Ask The Search Engines – Q&A Panel – You’ve heard the lingo: Using structured data to comply with Schema.org tagging, duplicate content penalties, canonical tags, sitemap structure, nofollow… and most recently a lot about the potential impact of Google’s new social efforts. In this session, you can ask questions and get direct answers from engineers from Google, Microsoft and the other search engines about crawling, indexing, ranking and other organic search issues.

Ask The SEOs – Q&A Panel – Some experts say content is king. Others maintain that acquiring quality links is the killer ranking factor. Still others swear by bleeding-edge SEO techniques that run the risk of drawing penalties and having sites banned by search engines altogether. In this no-holds-barred, all-questions-welcomed session, you’ll get a full-spectrum view of cutting-edge thinking and have your own opportunity to ask for SEO advice from some of the most respected and trusted search engine optimizers in the business.

Paid Search Track

Best Practices For Paid Search Testing – This session centers around the actual process of designing, implementing and measuring the results of paid search tests. Key topics will include what can and cannot be tested, how to design robust tests and identify all the biases and underlying problems of testing PPC campaigns. Our panelists will talk about process; they’ll also illustrate with case studies how to design a test for most effective bid levels, messaging, landing pages and other higher-level business questions that you must have answers for to successfully implement paid search.

Industrial Strength PPC
Are you managing thousands – or even millions – of paid search keywords? Perhaps for more than one website or customer? To do this effectively, you need to scale up from basic tools and Excel spreadsheets and adopt major league practices and processes. Panelists in this session share best practices learned from managing huge campaigns.

Ask The Paid Search Buyers – Q&A Panel – Imagine sitting down with the internet’s equivalent of legendary advertising “mad men” David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Mary Wells… Now imagine asking them to describe the secrets of their success – how they create brilliant ads out of a few scant words and calls to action, how they entice searchers to buy with carefully crafted landing pages and appealing “information scent.” Finally, imagine asking them to reveal the tactics and strategies they use when scrapping with sharp-elbowed competitors and strictly-business search engines so they can keep costs low and profits high. Now, stop imagining! And come to this session where you can ask these (and your) questions with some of the most successful paid search marketers working in the industry today.

Ask The Paid Search Reps – Q&A Panel – Google has famously written that to be a paid search advertiser, “all that’s needed is five minutes and a credit card.” While technically true, anyone who’s embarked on even a basic paid search campaign knows that you need to spend a lot of time, and in many cases a lot of money, to be truly successful. And with Google, Microsoft and other ad networks continually rolling out new features and ad quality requirements, it’s difficult to keep up. In this session, you’ll have the opportunity to put questions directly to representatives from the major search ad networks about their paid search programs.

Twitter & Facebook Track

Facebook SEO: Free Ways To Be Found On Facebook
Within Facebook, your pages are becoming a parallel universe to your public web pages. And increasingly, Facebook profiles are turning up in Google search results. There are numerous steps you can take to enhance your visibility both within Facebook and leverage that content on external search sources. The expert Facebook SEOs on this panel show you how to maximize this web phenomenon.

Creative Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers
Not advertising on Facebook? You’re missing out on potential traffic from the second largest internet website, with more than 800 million unique users. And if you’re familiar with Google AdWords or Microsoft’s adCenter you’ll love Facebook’s self-serve image and text-based ads that let you advertise your own web page or even your own Facebook page or event. Other cool features? Social actions, targeting, real time reporting… you really should make time to friend this program at SMX.

Twitter, SEO & Search
“But Twitter isn’t a search engine!” Well, comScore and other rating agencies beg to differ, with some stats putting Twitter in the top ranks of global search engines. Tweets are now increasingly featured in mainstream search results of Google and Bing. And don’t let the fleeting nature of tweets fool you – there are numerous tactics that add permanence and authority to your Twitter activities. This session takes a close look at SEO for Twitter and how search marketers can tap into the opportunities it offers.

Short But Sweet: The Power Of Twitter Ads
Twitter offers a rich advertising platform, with Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts that show up in user timelines – even for those who aren’t following your brand. You can also take advantage of targeting options that deliver ads specifically to desktop computers and laptops, iOS, Android, and other mobile devices. If you haven’t been “following” the ad options offered by Twitter this session will offer something more to “like.”

Local & Mobile Search Track

Mobile Trends: Search, Apps & Landing Pages – After years of pundits proclaiming that “this is the year of mobile,” it appears that in fact mobile finally has arrived – and in a big way. But unlike desktop activity, most mobile searches are for places or things people want right now. If you’re not creating mobile landing pages that facilitate immediate conversions, you may be losing out on sales. Apps are also a major source of mobile activity that you should consider. This panel looks at the current and rapidly evolving state of mobile and why it should be on every marketer’s radar.

How To Play In The Exploding Mobile Ads Universe – eMarketer predicts that mobile ad spend will surpass $17 billion in 2012. Haven’t done mobile search ads yet? Stop missing out! This session looks at mobile paid search opportunities and how search marketers can get ahead of this tsunami of opportunity.

What’s New With Local Search
As print yellow pages and newspaper classified ads go the way of the buggy-whip, local search engines and online yellow pages providers are growing fast, especially with the explosive increase in smart phone users and their need of location-specific info on demand. For any business that provides products or services to a local customer base, now is the time to get ahead of your competition and take advantage of comparatively low (or no) cost business listings, geotargeted ads and other marketing tools offered by local search engines. Find out how in this lively interactive session that will answer your questions about making the connection with customers in your own community.

Checking In With Location Services
Check-ins and social offers can great for raising awareness, gaining new customers and boosting loyalty among existing customers. But they can also be disastrous if not implemented properly. This session explores the mechanics of check-ins and offers, when they’re appropriate for a business (and when not) and who the key players are, with plenty of time for Q&A about these burgeoning new channels for marketers.

SMX Advanced Track

Getting The Most Out Of Retargeting From The Pros
If that visitor from your search ad doesn’t convert, retargeting (also called remarketing) allows you to keep your message in front of them, as they visit sites from across the web. This session looks at how the pros are making use of retargeting to extend their reach and boost conversions. Learn the right and wrong ways for advertisers to stay on target.

Life In A [Not Provided] World – All serious SEOs know that with everyone using the same keyword research tools, gaining an edge can be tough. And with Google no longer passing the most frequent search terms visitors used to get to your site, how can you know what’s working in your SEO efforts? There are a range of other options out there you can – and should – consider. This session looks at some and how to use them to perform better research.

Surviving Personalization With Bing & Google
The “new normal” search results are personalized, with search history, location and social interactions used to customize the results searchers see. This session looks at how Google taps into Google+ for its new Search Plus Your World and how Bing uses Facebook to create “Liked Results”.

Quality Score: The Unwritten Manual For Google AdWords & Bing adCenter – Google and Microsoft place enormous emphasis on Quality Score, a formula that determines both the display position and ultimate cost of ads. Much has been written about Quality Score, but this session goes beyond common lore, and does more than simply list similarities and differences between Google and Microsoft’s formulas for calculating quality, providing important insights that all advanced advertisers need to succeed.

Social & YouTube Track

The Real Time & Social Search Landscape
Real time and social search results are now solidly integrated into the major search engines in a variety of ways. If your search marketing efforts aren’t including significant efforts to influence these “non-traditional” results, it’s likely you’re missing out on significant traffic. This session provides an overview of the current landscape and the opportunities available to those who invest in social and real-time search marketing.

Maximizing YouTube Visibility With Organic SEO
YouTube is the leading online video destination, which makes it in turn the leading video search engine (and by some measures, the 2nd or third search engine overall). YouTube content is also widely distributed in search results elsewhere, including those of its owner, Google. But you can’t take advantage of this great additional traffic by just uploading your videos; every second, another hour of video is added to YouTube, making it nearly impossible for people to find your content if it isn’t optimized for searchers. Tune in to this session to find out how to be seen while your less-sophisticated competitors remain offstage.

YouTube Ads For Fun And Profit
As one of the top three largest search engines in the world, YouTube is huge potential source of traffic and revenue – but only if you are exploring the multitude of ad formats it offers. You can use your existing AdWords account to place text, image and click-to-play (CTP) video ads – or create direct YouTube campaigns with other formats including homepage roadblocks, branded channels and contests. This session shows you how to effectively reach an audience that’s more than double the prime-time reach of all three major U.S. broadcast networks combined.

Analytics & Conversions Track

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Demystifying 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.

SEO & Competitive Analysis
It’s not enough to be brilliant with your own SEO efforts. You also need to have an intimate understanding of your competitors – their keywords, optimization techniques, linking tactics – everything they’re doing to enhance their rankings and jostle you out of position on search result pages. It’s relatively easy to apply the time-tested techniques of competitive intelligence to give yourself an edge, and this session shows you how.

Justifying The Investment: Analytics For Social Media – It won’t be long before management and clients are questioning the value of your social media investment…if they aren’t already. So how do you demonstrate the ROI of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social media marketing opportunities? This session takes a deep dive on emerging social media analytics methods, how to establish and document social media key performance indicators (KPIs), and how to measure conversions even when engagements don’t result in transactions. We’ll also suggest tools you can use to measure ROI on your social media marketing activities.

Overlooked, Underloved & Unknown Analytics – All analytics packages come with dozens, if not hundreds of reports that slice, dice and segment countless variables, all purporting to offer comprehensive metrics about the performance of your search marketing campaign. While many of these reports are great, you can often get much deeper insights – and “ah-ha” takeaways – from lesser known or even undocumented reporting options. Speakers in this session show you how to tap into these undiscovered gems.

Technical SEO Track

Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems – Some technical SEO issues can be really tough to troubleshoot and fix. We’ll dive deep into how to diagnose the root cause of issues and how to get them fixed once and for all.

Schema & Authorship: 1 Year Later

It’s been over a year since Schema.org, a joint alliance between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, provided a common foundation for sites to provide microdata and enhance rich snippets. We’ve also had Google’s rel=author tag enabling content sites to help identify their authors on the site and across the web. Beyond these, other meta tags have either gained prominence or become less important. This session looks at how to get the most out of these opportunities.

Industrial Strength SEO

Managing SEO for a large web site isn’t for the faint of heart. You’ve got major technical challenges, such as dealing with content management systems, thousands or millions of keywords, multiple domains, multiple countries, constantly changing content. And that doesn’t even factor in the major “people challenges” of training and managing diverse teams, dealing with competing stakeholders, placating meddling executives… and the beat(ing) goes on. In this session, our panel of experts have all wrestled with SEO for huge websites and won, and share their unique insights and battle scars.

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.