Search Marketing Expo West

Breakfast & Registration

General

Keynote – An Insider’s Look At Google Research – Come hear Peter Norvig, who spearheads Google’s wide-ranging research efforts, offer behind-the-scenes demos of some of the cool technology the company is developing for future generations of products and services. Norvig is the author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook on the subject, and is also a popular and entertaining speaker. This is a keynote you won’t want to miss!

Level: Intermediate
Focus: SEM

Social Media Track

Twitter Marketing Tactics – "But Twitter isn’t a search engine!" Actually, it does have one. Plus, tweets are now increasingly being featured in mainstream search results. This session takes a close look at Twitter and shows how to tap into the opportunities it offers.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: PPC

Overlooked Opportunities Track

Bring In The Bling Via Bing Cashback – Bing’s Cashback has some intriguing elements for marketers. Cashback is a true cost-per-acquisition program, charging marketers a fee on those products purchased. That makes Cashback a true alternative to paid search or SEO models. You will learn how to take advantage of the program at this session.

Level: Beginner
Focus: SEO

Technical SEO Track

Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues – So, you’re not getting the traffic you expected. Your site isn’t being fully indexed? You just experienced a huge drop in rankings or traffic? Want to know how to fix it, and maybe go far beyond where you were? This session provides a step-by-step checklist to help developers or others diagnose site issues and ensure they’re following best technical practices in SEO.

Level: Advanced
Focus: PPC

Paid Search Track

Paid Search Bullseye! Reaching and Closing Your Ultimate Customer – Let us begin by saying that this is not an analytics panel. This isn’t even a technology panel. This panel is about getting to the core of all of our planning, budgeting and endless hours of work – our specific and ultimate consumer. We dare say that this will be the most diverse and unique group assembled at SMX this year – highly specialized marketers, professors and researchers who will give attendees an intense look at the differences between how various consumers search and buy.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: SEO

Social Media Track

Free Ways To Market On Facebook – Your Facebook pages – your wall, groups and fan pages — are a parallel universe to your public web pages. Just as you implement search engine optimization tactics to improve web page rankings, Facebook features many opportunities to enhance your visibility. Viral distribution via Facebook’s social tools is an example, but there are many, many others. Expert SEOs on this panel will share field-proven tactics that reveal how to leverage the power of Facebook.

Level: Beginner
Focus: All

Overlooked Opportunities Track

Your 90 Day SEM Fitness Plan – Got a small business or small staff? Or just want a strategy to get your SEM efforts in shape? This session provides a realistic workout plan to pump you up in 90 days.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: SEO

Technical SEO Track

Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz – Technical SEO Tactics – Subdomains or subdirectories? Are tracking parameters a problem for search engines? Do keywords in the URL make a difference? How about the "level" of a page? Is "deep" in a site bad? This session focuses on technical SEO questions, offering proven answers and tactics for dealing with these tricky issues… without harming your organic search engine rankings.

Level: Advanced
Focus: All

Paid Search Track

Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search – Search and display ads are two entirely different creatures, yet web surfers see them both, and research demonstrates that integrated search/display campaigns deliver superior results. What? Brand-enhancing display ads help search ads improve overall campaign performance? Yes. This session looks at the benefits of integrated search/display campaigns, best practices for implementing them, and how to allocate their contribution to results.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: PPC

Social Media Track

Facebook Ad Tactics For Search Marketers – Not advertising on Facebook? You’re missing out on potential traffic from the second largest website with more than 350 million unique users. Facebook’s self-serve image and text-based ads let you advertise your own web page or even your own Facebook page or event. They also offer a way to catch people in “pre-search” mode, when they’re almost ready to seek a solution. Other cool features? Social actions, targeting, real time reporting… you really should make time to ‘friend’ this program at SMX.

The session will cover:

• A short introduction to how Facebook ads work, for those new to them
• How consumers are searching for information about brands within the Facebook social network
• How Facebook ads can have a similar performance and ROI to search ads
• Case studies of how Facebook ads are being used by major companies and smaller businesses
• Tools, tips & techniques to give you more from your Facebook campaigns

Level: Intermediate
Focus: SEO

Overlooked Opportunities Track

Universal & Blended Search Opportunities – When Google introduced Universal Search in 2007, it sent shockwaves through the search marketing community. The typical reaction: "How can my optimized content rank when local, news, video and images results are pushing it off the SERPs" The simple answer is to optimize multiple types of "web assets" in addition to the text on your web pages, and you’ll often get more exposure on search result pages. Though the answer is simple, the SEO techniques to achieve the desired result usually aren’t. This session looks at the state of Universal search today, and how to leverage different types of content to gain maximum advantage.

Level: Advanced
Focus: SEO

Technical SEO Track

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, optimizing for thousands or millions of keywords, multiple domains, often in multiple countries and constantly changing content. And those don’t even factor in the major "people challenges" of training and managing diverse teams, dealing with competing stakeholders, placating meddling executives. In this session, our panel of experts will share their insights and bare the battle scars inflicted while successfully managing SEO for huge websites.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: PPC

Paid Search Track

Ask The Paid Search Buyers – Imagine sitting down with the internet’s equivalent of legendary advertising "mad men" David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett and 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 customers to buy with carefully crafted landing pages and appealing "information scent." Finally, imagine learning the tactics and strategies they use when scrapping with sharp-elbowed competitors and strictly-business search engines to keep costs low and profits high. Now, stop imagining! Come to this session and get answers to these (and your) questions from some of the most successful paid search marketers working in the industry today.

Level: Beginner
Focus: All

Social Media Track

60 Minutes Per Day For Social Media Success – Got a small staff? Just don’t have a lot of time? This session looks at how to succeed with social media marketing by spending an hour per day — or less! Tools and techniques to keep you from feeling swamped in the social media quagmire.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: SEO

Overlooked Opportunities Track

Optimizing Your Content On YouTube – YouTube is the leading online video destination. It’s also the leading video search engine (by some measures the second largest search engine overall). AndYouTube content is widely distributed in search results elsewhere, including on Google. But with 20 hours of video being uploaded every minute, being found on YouTube is difficult. Tune in to this session and you’ll learn how to optimize your video content to rank best.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: All

Technical SEO Track

The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters – Google has sent strong signals that the download speed of web pages matters, not only for the best conversion rates but perhaps as a factor for ranking in the SERPs in the future. In addition, speed can have an impact on how many of your pages get indexed. Here’s how to make sure your web pages are speedy, both for users and Google.

Level: Intermediate
Focus: PPC

Paid Search Track

Ask The Paid Search Reps – 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 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.