Ultimate Search Conference: Day 2

Day 2: Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Keynotes for the Day
Keynote: Satya Nadella – SMX Seattle
Roundtable: Content is King! (Again?) – Ad:Tech San Francisco

SEO-friendly Content & Design Track
Top Takeaways

• Good site design is invisible because it’s seamless and just "works". Bad design is noticeable because it’s clunky, makes people squint and is altogether frustrating.
• Don’t get your keywords from your CEO or from a spreadsheet, get them from your audience.
• Search engine friendly design does not mean that the sites have to be ugly.
• Good content isn’t mysterious. It’s the regular pages on your site.
• Teach your writers about social media and encourage them to become knowledgeable of social media sites and their demographics when writing towards them.

Stay Invisible With Good Design — BlogWorld
Speakers: Liz Danzico

SEO Design & Organic Structure – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Todd Friesen (moderator), Mark Jackson, Lyndsay Walker, Paul Bruemmer, Alan K’necht

Effective Action-based Copywriting – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brian Clark, Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen

Content Creation: Cranking It Out – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Ted Ulle, Robin Liss and Rae Hoffman

Understanding Analytics Track
Top Takeaways

• Search marketers must look beyond the last click or the last ad seen in order to find a richer story.
• Track robot and spider activity to find out how many days it will take for your pages to get indexed.
• Don’t use redirects to hide tracking URLs. They may help make your URLs look pretty for users, but they wipe out your ability to track.
• Don’t assume anything.
• 82 percent say that Web analytics is poorly understood and/or not used in their organization.

Measurement & Metrics – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Rick Bruner (moderator), Young-Bean Song, Chad Parizman, Darren Stoll, and John Squire

Web Analytics & Measuring Success – SES New York
Speakers: Allan Dick (moderator), Laura Thieme, and Stacy Williams

Issues in Analytics – SES San Jose
Speakers: Alex Bennert (moderator), Eric Enge, John Marshall, Avinash Kaushik, and Jonah Stein

Analytics Tracking Performance: Beyond the Page View — PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Joe Laratro (moderator), John Marshall, and Scott Orth

Intermediate SEO Track
Top Takeaways

• Search Information Marketing uses search data and intelligence to improve marketing. It entails using users’ own words to get a better understanding of who they are, what they’re looking for, and what’s important to them.
• Spam is about the intent and the extent to which you use a technique.
• Test a small number of variations: Rule of thumb is less than 100 conversions per combination.
• Apply different weight to different actions. Downloading a white paper is more valuable than looking at a banner. Identify when the action took place. When you convert, those drivers are calculated in different ways.
• With personalization, the engines are trying to better match a page to users’ interests. You must give them enough information to determine the topic of your page.

Putting Search Into The Marketing MixM – SES New York
Speakers: Gord Hotchkiss (moderator), Bill Mungovan, Curtis Dueck, and Misty Locke

Penalty Box Summit – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Peter Linsley, Aaswath Raman, Tim Mayer, and Matt Cutts

Multivariate Testing & Conversion Tweaking – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Gillian Muessig (moderator), Tom Leung, Glenn Alsup, Philippe Lang and Rand Fishkin

Personalized Search: Fear or Not – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Matt Cutts, Michael Gray, Gord Hotchkiss, and Tim Mayer

Paid Search Boot Camp Track
Top Takeaways

• Know what your company is doing at all times. You don’t want to get into a situation where you’re outbidding yourself. There is no SEM’s Dumbest award.
• The lifecycle of an API is only 6-9 months at most. If you’re going to adopt an API program, there is a cost involved.
• Evaluate second tier PPC engines based on a cost/benefit analysis.
• Consistent reporting is key to successful PPC management and optimization.
• Track only what is important to you and forget the rest.

Benchmarking a PPC Campaign – SES New York
Speakers: Alan Dick (moderator), Cam Balzer, Mike Moran, and Martin Laetsch

Search APIs – SES San Jose
Speakers: Anne Kennedy (moderator), David Flesh, Dan Boberg, Julienne Thompson Hood and Jon Diorio

Beyond the Majors – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeff Rohrs (moderator), Scott Greenberg, Matthew Greitzer, T.J. Kelly, Anton E. Konikoff, and Tom Paraboschi

Contextual Ad Programs – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Brian Axe, Jay Sears, and Tony Wills

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.