SMX West 2012 Full Conference Agenda
Day 2: February 29, 2012

Search & Social Track

Solution Spotlight by Round Sky (10:45-10:50)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

SEO For Google+ & Google Search (#smx #22A)
It hasn’t even been a year since Google launched Google+ and associated +1 buttons, but they’re already having a dramatic impact on Google’s search listings. Google’s new social network affects search rankings as well as how listings appear. In this session, the latest knowledge and tips on how you can’t ignore Google+ if you’re hoping to do well with Google Search.

New Thinking Track

Solution Spotlight by blekko (10:45-10:50)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Search Marketing & Competitive Analysis (#smx #22B)
It’s not enough to be brilliant with your own search marketing efforts. You also need to have an intimate understanding of your competitors – their keywords, optimization techniques, linking tactics, campaign management efforts – everything that they’re doing to enhance their own visibility and jostle you out of position. It’s relatively easy to apply the time-tested techniques of competitive intelligence to give yourself an edge, and this session shows you how.

Technical SEO Track

Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems (#smx #22C)
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.

Paid Search & In House Track

Solution Spotlight by Trada (10:45-10:50)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Search Ads: Taking Your Ads From Good To Great! (#smx #22D)
The difference between a good ad and a great ad is like the difference between a pair of jacks and a royal flush. The great ad wins every time! In this highly-interactive session, you will learn the best practices for creating great search ads and sharpen your copywriting skills. Our presenters will show you their favorite tips and tricks, and cover all the new text ad formats and extensions. You are guaranteed to take home dozens of powerful ideas guaranteed to improve your ad performance and conversion rates!

Plus Session & Clinic Track 

What’s this?

Integrating SEO and Social Media – Get More Lift

Today’s search engines are leveraging social signals. For the past year, the search engines have been aggressively integrating social features into their SERPs. Why should companies care? One reason is reputation management. It is now more critical for companies to think about their brand and reputations not only with social media initiatives, but with SEO as well. So how can companies actively leveraging social media programs drive SEO benefits? How can brands generate popularity and loyalty by optimizing social media content for SEO success? This session will provide many of the answers. Attendees will take away new ideas for identifying tactics and strategies for effectively integrating SEO and earned social media efforts.

Speaker:

L. Jennette Banks, Web Search Marketing Manager and Digital Strategist – IBM SWG Web Search Strategy and Solutions

Tim Grenda, Content Specialist, Matrix Direct Insurance

Jeff MacGurn, VP of SEO, Covario

This session is sponsored and produced by Covario. It is open to all SMX West attendees, including Expo+ Pass holders.

Search & Social Track

Solution Spotlight by Brafton (1:30-1:35)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Building Buzz On Twitter: Getting Followed & Retweeted (#smx #23A)
Twitter isn’t just for fun. It’s big business, being used to drive traffic and generate buzz and conversions for companies. Aside from driving direct traffic, tweets can also be links that search engines measure for ranking purposes. Tweets also are social signals that may be taken into account for rankings. In this session, tips on how to become an authority and how to get others to retweet what you put out.

New Thinking Track

Solution Spotlight by Textbroker (1:30-1:35)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Differentiate Or Die (#smx #23B)
For virtually every topic, product or category, you’re competing with thousands of other sites for search visibility, and searchers rarely click past the first result page. Much tactical SEO advice is practical, but won’t help at all unless you have a higher-level understanding of what might work in your category. This session looks at big picture strategies that can help you stand out, focusing on brand building, social media influence and viral techniques that go beyond the tactics that many people try (and fail) in their SEO efforts.

Technical SEO Track

Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging Best Practices (#smx #23C)
The search engines have been kind to SEOs recently, adding a number of new tools that when used properly promise to improve visibility and rankings for certain types of content. Schema.org, a joint alliance between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo provides a common foundation of support for a set of microdata types. Google’s rel=author tag enables content sites to help identify their authors on the site and across the web. And other meta tags have either gained prominence or become less important. Come find out how to take full advantage of all of these new goodies.

Paid Search & In House Track

Best Practices For Paid Search Testing – Case Study Panel (#smx #23D)
Design, implement and measure results of paid search tests after attending this session. Key topics will include what can and cannot be measured, how to design robust tests and identify the biases and underlying challenges of testing PPC campaigns. Our panelists will illustrate with case studies how to design a test for most effective bid levels, messaging and landing pages.

Plus Session & Clinic Track 

What’s this?

Magic Moments in Search

Search marketing is full of magic moments. Come discover each magic moment that a search management tool like DoubleClick Search can deliver to your team and see first-hand how to be more efficient in your day-to-day workflow, reporting, and bid optimization activities. Also, get a sneak peek of our vision for the rest of the DoubleClick Platform and learn how search is just one of several online channels you should be thinking about for 2012.

Speaker:

Umesh Unnikrishnan, Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Kit Broussard, Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

This session is sponsored and produced by DoubleClick Search by Google. It is open to all SMX West attendees, including Expo+ Pass holders.

Search & Social Track

Solution Spotlight by aimClear (3:30-3:35)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Building Buzz On Facebook: Getting Liked & Shared (#smx #24A)
If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. That’s a huge amount of potential traffic. Getting your content "liked" and shared is critical to getting found on Facebook. Knowing what’s acceptable promotion is key to successfully leveraging Facebook’s 800 million strong community. The Facebook experts on this panel will show you how to most effectively drive traffic from this social phenomenon.

New Thinking Track

Solution Spotlight by ClickPath (3:30-3:35)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Beyond The Google AdWords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics (#smx #24B)
Doing keyword research? Chances are, you went straight to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find answers. It’s a wonderful tool, but 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.

Technical SEO Track

Making Data From Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools Actionable (#smx #24C)
The search engines make more and more data available all of the time, but how can you determine priority and impact to use that information to influence your overall marketing and technical development roadmap? Learn what the data really mean and how can you use it to your advantage.

Paid Search & In House Track

In-House SEO: Organizational SEO Challenges & Solutions (#smx #24D)
In this session we’ll talk about SEO operations (the systems, templates, worfklows, etc.) when doing SEO in-house. This session will be less about SEO tactics and tools you hear about, and more about the integral workings of in-house SEO from idea to launch, and how the nitty-gritty details don’t get lost along the way.

Search & Social Track

Solution Spotlight by BoostCTR (5:00-5:05)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Creative Facebook Ad Tactics (#smx #25A)
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, your Facebook page or Event page. Other cool features? Social actions, targeting, real time reporting. Make time to "friend" this session at SMX.

New Thinking Track

How Siri, Search By Voice & Search By App Are Changing The Mobile Landscape (#smx #25B)
The world of mobile search keeps shifting rapidly. Recently, more people were found to be using mobile apps than their mobile web browser. Siri has also introduced the masses to the concept of voice search, building that into the iPhone 4s, as voice search was already built into the Android and Windows Phone platforms. As mobile continues to gain share and importance, how will voice and apps change search and SEO? Panelists will offer practical tips for marketers as well as their thoughts on how these mobile-centric innovations could reshape the search experience for the long term.

Technical SEO Track

Duplication, Aggregation, Syndication, Affiliates, Scraping And Information Architecture (#smx #25C)
We’ll sort through the bewildering world of near duplication due to issues such as manufacturer feeds into your site, syndication to other sites, international sites, aggregation of data sources, boilerplate content, and pagination. How can a well-planned information architecture minimize the search obstacles and how can you best handle unavoidable duplication to avoid PageRank dilution, being classified as “thin affiliate”, “thin content” or low quality site by search engines? What’s the best way to implement complex, paginated sites for effective indexing and ranking? We’ll talk through all the options, including rel=canonical, rel=next/prev, noindex, nofollow, faceted navigation, and URL parameters.

Paid Search & In House Track

In-House PPC: Organizational PPC Challenges & Solutions (#smx #25D)
In this session you’ll hear from enterprise-level PPC in-housers who will talk about the nuances of managing PPC. Speakers will cover items such as managing at a large scale, managing multiple business units, what to do when campaigns that compete against each other for the same keywords and how to effectively compare programs and report progress to the execs.

Plus Session & Clinic Track

SEO Site Clinic (#smx #25E)
This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines.