SMX London Agenda – Day 1 – 4 November, 2008
Expo Hall Hours: 8:00am – 7:00pm

SMX London Agenda – Day 2 – 5 November, 2008
Expo Hall Hours: 8:00am – 4:30pm

Full Conference Agenda Day 1 – 4 November, 2008
Expo Hall Hours: 8:00am – 7:00pm

General

Keynote – Empowering Search Marketers – The Next Generation – Get ready for the next big leap forward in search innovation. The past few years have seen the introduction of new features offering richer search results, personalization and other tools designed to empower searchers. Search engines are now shifting focus, preparing new, highly sophisticated tools designed to take marketers to the next level, enabling them to fine-tune campaigns in ways not previously achievable. In this forward-looking keynote conversation, Microsoft’s development leaders on both the paid and organic side discuss their vision of the future of search marketing—how they’re breaking down barriers and building a powerful new set of tools that move beyond straightforward functionality toward a new paradigm of providing unprecedented transparency and insight into searcher behavior and satisfying customer needs.

SMX Boot Camp Track

SMX Boot Camp: Keyword Research Tools & Techniques – The first step to success with 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 of performing keyword research.

Search Issues Track

The Global Search Universe – Google is the dominant player in the U.K, but other search engines are favored by people in other countries. In this session, analysts who measure internet usage and trends report on the market shares that search engines have around the globe, and what people in various countries are searching for.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Ads

Pump Up Your Paid Search – Google has famously claimed that launching a paid search campaign takes just "five minutes and a credit card." That’s true, but to be really successful you need to think tactically and create ads and landing pages that truly engage users. In this session, tips and techniques designed to help pros get even more out of their search advertising campaigns.

Speakers:

Richard Gregory, COO, Latitude
Anneli Ritari, Senior Strategist, Travel, bigmouthmedia
Nick Seckold, Head of Search, MindShare Media UK Ltd
Pete Wailes, MD Searchlight Digital, Searchlight Digital

SMX Boot Camp Track

Fundamentals of Search Advertising – Google famously once said that buying search advertising took just "five minutes and a credit card." While technically true, there’s a lot more to creating & running a successful search advertising campaign. In this session you’ll learn how to get started with search ads on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and how to take advantage of the various options to maximize the impact of your campaigns.

Search Issues Track

European Search Marketing Challenges – Search marketers working in European countries face unique challenges, ranging from legal issues, how to reach small and medium sized businesses, or the opposite—coping with the complexities of managing huge sites on complex CMS systems and satisfying the needs of a large number of shareholders. This session examines these issues, offering pragmatic advice and tips for overcoming challenges to creating successful search marketing campaigns.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Ads

Landing Pages Testing & Optimisation – Landing pages – the pages visitors first see when arriving from a search engine result – are arguably the most important element of a successful website. The design, testing and optimisation of landing pages is crucial. This session looks at tools and techniques for comparing and testing landing page elements for optimal results.

SMX Boot Camp Track

SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals – Links are the way search engines made the great leap forward from Search 1.0 to 2.0. They remain one of the most important factors influencing rankings. This session covers how search engines perform link analysis to rank pages and how to increase your traffic by building quality links in an appropriate fashion.

Search Issues Track

SEO & Social Media Marketing – More and more, people are finding that social media marketing — SMM — can help with SEO efforts. Getting your content into the major social media sites can generate links or provide rankings you might not be able to tap into with your own site. In this session, SMM essentials that SEOs need to know.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Ads

Search Marketing & Persona Models – Personas are a way to model the basic types of visitors you expect to come to your site and tailor the arrival experience to fit their needs. This session looks at how personas can be a powerful tool for improving paid search performance, covering how to create them and case studies on their use in PPC.

SMX Boot Camp Track

SMX Boot Camp: Search Engine Friendly Web Design – “I’m not designing my site for search engines,” is a common designer objection to SEO suggestions. But when search engines collectively have more users than either Internet Explorer or Firefox, how can you afford to ignore how they interact with your site. Search engines are like the third major browser, and if your site breaks for them, it breaks for all those potential visitors from search engines. Search engine friendly sites aren’t hard to create and can be attractive to both search engines and human visitors at the same time. Learn more in this session.

Search Issues Track

International SEO – Do you – or can you – sell worldwide? If so, there might be some low-hanging fruit you can pick up by considering SEO for searchers outside your home market, even if your site is in English. This session looks at how to make some simple changes to please alternative search engines along with some of the challenges you’ll need to consider.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Ads

Avoiding PPC Pitfalls – When done right, pay-per-click (PPC) search ads can be a company’s most valuable marketing channel. But there are common pitfalls that can mean the difference between a campaign that bombs and one that makes you the rock star of your marketing program. Fortunately, many of these are easy to fix, once you know what to look out for. This session will cover danger areas such as match types, content network ads, ego bidding, failure to track properly and more. Learn how to increase your ROI on paid search in this session!

Full Conference Agenda Day 2 – 5 November, 2008
Expo Hall Hours: 8:00am – 6:00pm

9:00am-10:15am
(1 hr 15 min)

Alternative Tactics & Diagnosis Track

Brand & Reputation Management Strategies – With the proliferation of blogs, social media and other ‘consumer generated content’ sites it’s getting more challenging for organizations to manage perceptions about their products and services. How can you respond to negative opinions, much less find them? How can you correct misleading information on sites you don’t control-including search result pages? Learn how to ‘take back the web’ in this session.

Big Site & Big Brand Track

Industrial Strength SEO – When you’re doing SEO for a big site — or tens or hundreds of sites — you’ve got to bring in the big tools, lots of organizational skills and knowhow to integrate SEO with the ongoing web production processes and employee thinking in general. This session examines both the technical and organizational challenges of running huge web sites that must be search friendly.

Speakers:

Richard Baxter, UK SEO Manager, Cheapflights.co.uk
Gary Moyle, SEO Consultant, Guava
Dave Naylor, Owner, Bronco
Neil Stickells, Head of SEO, Steak

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Organic

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques – Want to learn how to build a database of high-value link acquisition targets? Want to know how to get on the radar of nonprofits, government and university departments and compel them to give you some of that sweet, authoritative link love? Want to learn the most coveted secrets to “buying” the links the engines would never consider a “paid link?” This, along with non-traditional link sources, linking strategies and nofollow PageRank “sculpting” or “siloing” are covered in the session.

10:15am-10:45am
(30 min)

Refreshment Break

Alternative Tactics & Diagnosis Track

Integrating Search & Display Marketing Campaigns – Search is the ultimate pull medium, but combining it with targeted display advertising campaigns increases click through rates and brand awareness, providing the best of both pull and push mediums online. This session examines best practices, learnings from UK campaigns as well as mistakes to avoid. The session also includes examples of integration with search and offline marketing campaigns.

Big Site & Big Brand Track

SEO For Web 2.0 Sites – Let’s say SEO 1.0 is about ensuring that 1990s-era web design techniques such as tables and frames are adjusted to minimize search engine ranking issues. Well, now the Web 2.0 design world is firmly upon us, bringing with it CSS, AJAX and other dynamic design techniques that can give search engines fits. SEO 2.0 is all about ensuring that Web 2.0 sites are as search engine friendly as Web 1.0 sites.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Organic

My Secret Weapon – The best search marketers have all found a unique edge, whether it’s a tool that provides competitive insights, a technique that’s not been discovered by others, or a singular approach that’s difficult to copy. In this session, top search marketers reveal their secret weapon and how to use it to your own advantage.

Alternative Tactics & Diagnosis Track

International Search Advertising Opportunities – You can run global search ad campaigns on the big three engines, but you may get better targeting and more success using powerful regional players, such as Yandex, Baidu, Naver and others you may not be familiar with. An overview of options and how to effectively manage an international search advertising campaign.

Big Site & Big Brand Track

Search 3.0: Video Search & Blended Results – This session looks at how video and image content is being blended into the main results at major search engines and provides tips on increasing the odds that your content makes the cut for the first page of results.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Organic

Buying Sites For SEO – Forget the debate over buying links. How about buying entire web sites to gain success in search. This session looks at how to find the gems out there, criteria to consider, ways to negotiate and how to best leverage your new purchase. Tips, tricks, success stories, and painful lessons learned will be shared.

Alternative Tactics & Diagnosis Track

Paid Search Checkup – Does your search advertising campaign need help? This session features paid search experts who go live on the web to review ads and landing pages. Offer up your campaign for review or learn as other paid search campaigns are examined.

Big Site & Big Brand Track

Search 3.0: Local Search & Blended Results – This session covers how local listings are being blended into the regular results of major search engines and offers tips to increase the chances that your listings will be among those folded in.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus On Organic

What You Should Be Measuring — But Aren’t! – CPA, ROI, CTR, ROAS — these are metrics commonly used to assess the success of a paid search campaign, but are they the right ones? This session looks at other metrics to also consider, along with some things to track that you might be overlooking.