Ultimate Search Conference: Day 1

Welcome to Day 1 of the Ultimate Search Conference! Below you’ll find your agenda for the day. So, go grab a bagel and some coffee and jump in. You have a long day of sessions and great speakers ahead. Enjoy!

Day 1: Monday, December 24, 2007

Keynotes for the Day:
You&A with Matt Cutts – SMX Seattle
Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan – SES NY

SEO for N00bs
Top Takeaways

• Make it easy for the search engines to find, spider and index your content by getting rid of any unnecessary roadblocks.
• Good directories are human-edited, offer static links, aged and have high quality backlinks. Avoid all others.
• Use content to build links. When you produce interesting content, people will naturally want to link to you.
• There is no penalty for duplicate content, it’s a filter.
• Help protect your content from scrapers by using your brand name, absolute links, and hosting images locally. Take legal action when necessary.

SEO Advanced Q&A – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Bruce Clay (moderator), Aaron D’Souza, and Sandor Marik

Linking Strategies – SES NY
Speakers: Justilien Gaspard, Greg Boser, and Jim Boykin

Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate Content Issues – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Aaron Shear (moderator), Rahul Lahiri, Derrick Wheeler, Evan Roseman, and Priyank Garg

Converting Visitors into Buyers – SES London
Speakers: Mike Sack (moderator), Sarah Bubb, Alex Bennert, and Brian Clifton

PPC Basics Track
Top Takeaways

• The 4 Pillars of PPC: Positioning, Test & Learn, Standards, and Integration.
• Determine what your metrics are before you start and decide if you have the knowledge level to optimize PPC campaigns inhouse.
• Quality Score is a way for search engines to rank ads based on a variety of factors. There are two Scores-one that affects your minimum bid and one that affects your rank.
• It’s users who ultimately define the quality of an ad, not the search engines.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment with the look and feel of your ads in order to make them more "clickable" and increase conversions.

Pay Per Click Strategies – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Dana Todd (moderator), Daina Middleton and Mike Solomon.

Meet the Search Ad Networks – SES NY
Speakers: Rebecca Lieb (moderator), Doug Stotland, Stewart Easterby, John Kannapell, James Speer, and Brian Schmidt

Ads in a Quality Score World – SES NY
Speakers: Gord Hotchkiss (moderator), Joshua Stylman, Andrew Goodman, and Jonathan Mendez

Optimizing your Site for Contextual Ads – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Matt Daimler, Jaan Janes, and Aaron Wall

Social Media Overview Track
Top Takeaways

• Social search includes things like shared bookmarks, tagging engines, collaborative directories, personalized verticals, social Q&A sites, etc.
• The future of search is the integration of social knowledge to guide you to the right community.
• Social search gives site owners a chance to open up the deep pages of their site and expose the stuff that’s not getting attention.
• Link bait helps your site rank by giving it global authority, topical popularity, trust metrics, temporal influence, PageRank, anchor test, and topical relevance.
• Viral is an effect, not a cause. It’s about others evangelizing your content.

Social Search Overview – SES NY
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Grant Ryan, Tomi Poutanen, Apostolos Gerasoulis and Seth Godin

Linkbaiting & Viral Success – SES NY
Speakers: Rand Fishkin, Jennifer Laycock, Chris Boggs, and Cameron Olthuis

Viral & Word of Mouth – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Daniel Stein (moderator), Jamie Byrne, Benjamin Palmer, Gaurav Misra, and Sean Carver

User Generated Content in Search – SES San Jose
Speakers: Rebecca Lieb (moderator), Andrew Goodman, Matt McGee, and Lee Odden

Branding 101 Track
Top Takeaways

• We’re moving from a world of interruption to an environment of engagement. We have a consumer that is no longer ‘I’ shaped but "T" shaped, they’re broad and deep.
• Users gravitate towards companies with strong communities because it allows them to have a deeper interaction with that company.
• You no longer own your brand. Your brand is a conversation.
• Buzz monitoring involves finding the discussion areas to capture, understand, and report the products, issues, and opinions that consumers share between and among themselves.
• Anything negative out there is a risk. Don’t think that just because it’s not ranking yet doesn’t mean that it won’t.

Is Advertising Really The Solution? – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Pete Blackshawn (moderator), Scott Wilder, Beth Thomas-Kim, Paul Woolmington, and Tip Rose

Word
of Mouth Marketing – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brett Tabke (moderator), Louise Rijk, and Greg Hartnett

Buzz Monitoring – SES San Jose
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Rob Key, Andy Beal, and Jonathan Ashton

Brand Management – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Joe Laratro (moderator), Jessica L Bowman, Lauren Vaccarello, and Matt Tuens

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.