SMX West Agenda – Day 1 – March 2, 2010
Expo Hall Hours: 10:00am – 7:00pm

Full Conference Agenda Day 1 – Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Expo Hall Hours: 10:00am – 7:00pm

Keynote Conversation: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer address the search marketing community for the first time at an industry event. Learn what’s next for Bing, how the Bing/Yahoo relationship is progressing, and much more when Steve joins Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan for a keynote conversation.

SMX Boot Camp Track

SMX Boot Camp: 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.

Real Time, Personalized & Social Search Track

Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines – People are addicted to Twitter and Facebook because they can get up-to-the-minute information, ask questions of their social network and get instant answers. Recognizing this development, search engines are now incorporating results from these social networking services. In this session, you’ll learn to leverage the real time search phenomenon, and if pitfalls like real time spam will make real time search an evolutionary dead end.

Local & Mobile Search Track

Mobile Paid Search Ads: Real Opportunities – Haven’t done mobile search ads yet? You’re missing out on a growing market! Mobile ad spend will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012, according to eMarketer. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that "mobile will be a larger business than the PC-web," likely a primary reason Google recently spent $750 million to acquire mobile advertising network AdMob. This session looks at mobile paid search options and how search marketers can get ahead of this tsunami of opportunity.

SMX Advanced Track

Search, Domaining & Direct Navigation – It’s easy to think that search marketing is primarily about SEO and PPC advertising. Remarkably, a huge amount of traffic comes from people typing website URLs directly into either the address or search box of a browser. This offers a huge opportunity for those who correctly anticipate this type of demand, capturing traffic that bypasses traditional web search referrals.

SMX Boot Camp Track

SMX Boot Camp: Copywriting For Search Success – It’s pretty simple. Want to be found for certain words? It helps to actually use those words in your web pages! Learn the importance of textual content to search engines and how, with some forethought, to create HTML title tags and body copy that generate search traffic…while satisfying the needs of your human visitors.

Real Time, Personalized & Social Search Track

Real Time Search: Beyond The Majors – The major search engines aren’t the only ones offering real time search. A number of other players have been doing real time longer and more substantially. This session looks at some of the prominent up-and-coming providers of real-time search and opportunities and tools they offer.

Local & Mobile Search Track

Mobile Search Apps & Opportunities – Away from your computer, but need to search for something? There’s a smart phone app for that! More than 100,000 for the iPhone, 20,000 and growing for Google’s Android. This session looks at popular search apps on different devices, how they gather data and opportunities they offer to search marketers.

SMX Advanced Track

Not Your Father’s AdWords: The New Google Ad Formats – AdWords: Reliable. Trustworthy. Profitable. Old and stuffy. Now there’s a whole new generation: AdWords video ad, AdWords sitelinks, local AdWords, product AdWords, comparison ads and more. In this session, you’ll learn the pros and cons of each format, how to implement them properly, and how they compliment your existing AdWords campaigns.

SMX Boot Camp Track

SMX Boot Camp: 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.

Real Time, Personalized & Social Search Track

Google’s Personalized Search Revolution – Google has long maintained that personalized search results are the holy grail, offering a unique view of the web to everyone based on their interests, search behavior and other personal criteria. Recently, Google decided to turn this vision into reality by effectively customizing results for each searcher, in real time. This move promises to complicate traditional search engine optimization. How should you adapt? This panel takes a deep dive into how Google’s personalized search works and what role SEO still plays within it.

Local & Mobile Search Track

Ranking Tactics For Local Search – Have you claimed your local business listing yet? Started a reviews section, where you regularly interact with customers regardless of whether they’ve given you kudos or slammed your product or service? How about getting citations from major business data aggregators such as the internet yellow pages, Acxiom and others? If not, and you want to be found in local search, you need to attend this session where these and other crucial ranking factors will help you get grounded in your own online neighborhood.

SMX Advanced Track

Keyword Research: Beyond The Ordinary – You’ve mastered the tools. You’ve built out your keyword portfolio, keeping the winners and deleting the losers. How do you take it to the next level? This session looks at innovative approaches to keyword research that help you find those really significant keywords your customers are searching for, uncover your competitors’ keywords, mine the long tail for those elusive but truly valuable obscure search terms, and expand your "virtual shelf space" in surprising and non-obvious ways.

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, you can’t 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. Learn more about creating search engine friendly sites that can be attractive to both search engines and human visitors at the same time.

Real Time, Personalized & Social Search Track

The Current State Of Social Search – Social search involves tailoring search results based on people you know or those in your social network. This session looks in particular at Google’s social search experiment and where social search may be going in general, plus its impact on SEO.

Local & Mobile Search Track

Ask The Local Search Engines – Local search engines and online yellow pages providers are growing rapidly, as the explosive increase in smart phone use allows people to obtain location-specific information 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 by taking advantage of comparatively low (or no) cost business listings, geo-targeted ads and other marketing tools offered by local search engines. Find out how to best connect with customers in your own community in this lively interactive session.

SMX Advanced Track

Supercharging Your Descriptions With Sitelinks – Google Sitelinks have become ubiquitous, and any search marketer ignoring them is missing a major source of traffic. What are they? Sitelinks are links that lead to important pages within a site, appearing beneath both organic and paid search results. They provide searchers quick and easy access to internal site content via a single click without requiring another search. The good news is that Google now gives search marketers a lot of control over their sitelinks. Learn how to gain maximum advantage from these "bonus" links.

Full Conference Agenda Day 2 – Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Expo Hall Hours: 10:00am – 3:30pm

Breakfast & Registration

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Full Conference Agenda Day 3 – March 4, 2010

Keynote – The State Of The Search Union
We’ve just come through the most turbulent period in history for search marketers. Economic disruption, massive algorithm updates, the disappearance of a major player through consolidation with one of its former competitors… these events and others have reshaped the search landscape, creating both challenges and opportunities for search marketers. On this panel we’ve assembled some of the sharpest minds in search to discuss where things stand and where we’re going – you won’t want to miss the insights and recommendations from this group of super-savvy panelists.

SEO Track

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." In fact, links are cited as four of the top five factors in the SEOMoz 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors survey. And though linking seems easy, it’s a far more subtle art than most realize, and there are right and wrong ways to conduct a linking campaign. In this session, learn how to reach out and get quality links, how to craft anchor text to build authority, and how commonplace mistakes can destroy your web credibility (and search engine rankings).

Analytics & Conversion Track

Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing To Increase Conversions – You say ta-may-toe, I say toh-mah-toh… It’s easy to assume that the landing page you (or your boss) likes the best is best. But research conclusively demonstrates this is a false and a profit-limiting assumption. In this session, we’ll look at what happens when you test alternative versions of landing pages with multivariate testing tools –sometimes with surprising results that can lead to dramatic (we’re actually talking 100%+ or more, according to Google) increases in conversion.

In House & Specialty SEM Track

Bringing SEO In House: How To Be Successful! – Thinking about bringing SEO in-house? You’re not alone. Half of the companies bringing SEO in house believe they can do a better job of search engine optimization than outsourcing this vital activity. Learn what it takes, challenges you’ll face, how to structure the team, the resources to use and how to ease the transition in this session.

The Big Picture Track

Microsoft + Yahoo: What’s It All Mean? – After more than two years of courtship, Microsoft is now going to "do the heavy lifting" of providing both search results and search ads for Yahoo, while Yahoo focuses on "user experience" and selling to premium advertisers. So, can you simply optimize for Bing and buy adCenter ads to get optimal exposure on both? Not exactly. This panel explores the changes that are coming and the nuances search marketers need to take into account once the Microsoft Yahoo deal is finally consummated.

SEO Track

Ask The Search Engines – You’ve heard the lingo: page rank sculpting, duplicate content penalties, canonical tags, sitemap structure, nofollow… and if you’ve participated in Sphinn or other open search marketing forums you’ve also read wildly divergent explanations and interpretations of what it all means. In this session, you’ll get direct answers from engineers at search engines about crawling, indexing, ranking and other organic search issues.

Analytics & Conversion Track

Measuring How Search Ads Drive Offline Conversions – ROBO – This Terminator-like acronym actually means "research online, buy offline." Despite the fact that well over 90% of all purchases are made at brick and mortar stores, a study by Yahoo and comScore found that consumers exposed to online retail marketing campaigns were more engaged and spent more dollars in physical stores than otherwise. Good news – but how do you measure the effectiveness of your search marketing campaigns that drive offline sales – and more importantly, justify and increase your search marketing budget going forward? This session looks at tools and attribution models that can help you make sure you (and your finance people!) are giving credit where credit is due.

In House & Specialty SEM Track

Bringing PPC In House: How To Be Successful! – For many organizations, there’s a natural tension between internal marketing teams and the agencies they use to manage search marketing campaigns. To resolve this tension, or to better control costs, some organizations bring their paid search function in house. But there are challenges to the do-it-yourself approach, most notably the constant attention required monitor competitive campaign management issues. This session focuses on the best practices (and mistakes to avoid) to ensure your in house paid search campaign meets or exceeds all of your marketing goals.

The Big Picture Track

Mystery Search Science Theater – We’re reserving this session for the inevitable last-minute topic that everyone will be hungering for information about. What is it? We won’t know until just before the conference, but you can be sure our panelists will offer the most current, actionable information available.

SEO Track

Ask The SEOs – In this no-holds-barred, all-questions-welcome session, Powerpoint-free session, you’ll get a 360 degree view of cutting-edge thinking and get SEO advice from some of the most respected search engine optimizers in the business.

Analytics & Conversion Track

Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO – More than 90% of all search marketers are using an analytics solution of some kind, according Marketing Sherpa research. But all too often, the insights provided by search analytics languishes in ignored reports, yielding little meaningful support for PPC spending and SEO effort. Too bad, because effective use of analytics significantly boosts click throughs, conversions, return on ad spend and dozens of other metrics that may be important to your organization. But to benefit fully from your analytics solution, you need to create meaningful action plans based on data. Speakers in this session will offer case studies from their own successful analytics-driven search marketing action plans.

In House & Specialty SEM Track

The B2B Search Marketing Challenge – The basics of search marketing are similar, whether reaching out to consumers or businesses. But B2B search marketers face some unique challenges, including measuring effectiveness when buying cycles are long and attributing credit to marketing channels. Learn successful techniques for stepping up to the B2B search marketing plate, and closing sales, even over extended periods.

The Big Picture Track

Search Behavior: Using Research To Improve Results – Are you a one-person focus group when crafting search campaigns? There are more effective approaches…approaches that recognize the diversity searchers, their information needs and behaviors. Attribution modeling, eye tracking studies, and persona development are just some of the results-enhancing searcher behavior research methods and their uses discussed that will be discussed in this session.

SEO Track

Ask The Link Builders – So what’s the real scoop with link building in 2010? Can reciprocal links actually hurt your rankings? Do link building tools work, or is it still necessary to slog through time-consuming and tedious manual link building efforts? You’ll get a wide diversity of opinions from our panelists, who are all expert link-builders and each bring deeply seasoned approaches to this most fundamental yet vitally important search marketing activity.

Analytics & Conversion Track

Conversion Ninja Toolbox – A Review of Tools & Technologies – Testing alternative landing page content can dramatically increase conversion rates. But how do you know what to test? A number of powerful, inexpensive and easy-to-use new tools now make the process much easier. Learn the secrets of the pros by seeing a rapid-fire review of the best conversion improvement tools and technologies.

In House & Specialty SEM Track

Social Media, Search & Reputation Management – When Digg, Facebook, Twitter and other "social media" sites first emerged, they weren’t associated with search. Connecting the dots, marketers realized that popular content was being prominently indexed and social media sites were bestowing inbound links. Then the"ah-ha" moment, when search marketers realized they could influence front-page search results by "pushing" social media sites into top position, or manage negative publicity by getting social communities to "vote" for more favorable content and effectively decrease the exposure of naysayers. In this session you’ll learn techniques for managing your online reputation to drive traffic and preserve your reputation in a crisis.

The Big Picture Track

Thorny Legal Issues: What’s Happening and Why Should You Care? – Is using a competitor’s trademark in your ads or landing page copy OK or not? What kind of privacy issues are bubbling up around things like using cookies or tracking pixels to retarget searchers based on their search history? How are other countries legislating search marketing and privacy? This comprehensive update examines the hot-button legal issues and what search marketers need to know to protect themselves and their clients.