Search Conference Agenda

Below is a tentative agenda for the SearchCamp Philly event that the IM-DV Community came together with whiteboards and a lot of fun, to present for small businesses to see what they get before they sign up. As you can see we have 4 tracks, consisting of basic sessions, intermediate sessions and 2 tracks of advanced subjects. If you are interested in presenting your own session about something not already scheduled here, please see the Speaking Information provided by Podcamp Philly.

Search Conference Agenda Day 1

Search Conference Agenda Day 2

Search Conference Tracks

Here's a break down of our different search conference tracks

Basic Online Marketing Sessions

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Marketing 101: Learn the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). From title tags to good content, this session is designed to give you the quick, high level, "101" basics you'll need to understand SEO.
• PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing 101: PPC, also know as Pay Per Click marketing is the fast way to get your website into the search engines. This session is designed to give you a basic overall feel for how to launch a quick campaign in Google, Yahoo & MSN.
• Social Media Marketing 101: Social Media is the newest buzz word in the online world. From forums to networking sites, being active in the social media world is a must do now-a-days if you want to succeed in online marketing. This session goes over the basics do's and don'ts with Social Media.
• PR & The Web 101: Public Relations has to rely more and more on the web these days to get the message out. This sessions is designed to go over the basics of public relations when it meets the online marketing world and how to optimize public relations information for the search engines.
• Analytics 101: How the heck do I know if my campaigns in SEO, PPC and even Social Media are doing any good? Anayltics can help you decide what's succeeding and what's failing and where to put your marketing dollars. This session is designe to go over the basics of analytics to help measure online success.
• Usability 101: Is your website usable? Can visitors find things easily? How many clicks does it take to order something? Is your site in Flash? This session is designed to show attendees the basics of usability when it comes to building websites and its direct connection to SEO.
• Affiilate Marketing 101: Just what the heck is Affiliate Marketing and how do I do it, or get involved? This session answers those questions, going over both the "Being and Affiliate" and "Running an Affiliate Program" views.
• Blogging for Businesses: Wondering if your business should start a blog? Thinking a blog can drive more traffic to your website, and thereby more business? This sessions discusses what companies should be looking at when it comes to starting a blog, just for business sake.
• Free Search Engine Marketing Tools: You've heard of this tool, or that tool, that's suppose to be the holy grail of search, right? Well in this session, common, easy to use search marketing tools are discussed with tips on how to get the best use out of them.
• Conversion 101: You've gotten the visitors to your site, now what?! They're going to buy right? Not necessarily, in most cases they click away or hit the back button. This session is designed to go over some basic conversion strategies for websites, to increase conversion rates.

Intermediate Online Marketing Sessions

• Feeds: Feeds aren't just for blogs! Data feeds can be very useful to get specific information out to websites and search engine to promote products, services and even just companies and brands. This sessions is designed to go over the different kinds of feeds that can benefit different situations.
• Video & Podcast Optimization for Universal Search: So you've got a podcast, or maybe even some video, now what? How does the search engine know what that audio file or video is about? This sessions helps podcasters, vodcasters and video producers get the most out of the digital data for better searchability.
• Local Search: You're a local small business to Philly, you don't cater to a national or global market, how can you take advantage of search? Simple! Work with local search. This session is designed to give local small business owners some quick, high level strategies to get their businesses up and running in the local search engines.
• Online & Offline Convergance: Your PR department is doing a whole bunch of offline marketing. Your Marketing department is making some really cool commercials and print ads. People are going online and looking up some buzzwords from these offline efforts -but find nothing - or worse, they find your competitor. This sessions is designed to go over how to make online and offline marketing work together.
• Brand & Reputation Management: Walmart, Microsoft, Sony, Comcast... all of these big brand have had brand and repuatation management issues online. This session goes over some tips and strategies for monitoring your repuation and keeping the neative to a minimum online.
• Blended Search: What the heck is this "blended" or "universal" search I keep hearing about? Well all of the major search engines have gone away from the old "10 Blue Links" on a page, and started incorporating a lot more digital data into the results. This sessions goes over the changes with blended search and how websites are affected.
• Business to Business (B2B) Website Clinic: Is your website's business a Business to Business site? Are you having issues with ranking, conversions, or other things? This session will look at 2 Business to Business websites and the panelists will give feeback on how to improve the site. (To enter your website for the clinic, you must be attending SearchCamp Philly. Please email siteclinic [at] searchcampphilly [dot] com, with the subject B2B Site Clinic)
• Small Business (SMB) Website Clinic: Are you a small business and have a website? Are you having issues with ranking, conversions, or other things? This session will look at 2 Small Business websites and the panelists will give feeback on how to improve the site. (To enter your website for the clinic, you must be attending SearchCamp Philly. Please email siteclinic [at] searchcampphilly [dot] com, with the subject SMB Site Clinic)
• Business to Consumer (B2C) Webiste Clinic: Do you have a retail website? Selling products anyone can buy? Are you having issues with ranking, conversions, or other things? This session will look at 2 Business to Consumer websites and the panelists will give feeback on how to improve the site. (To enter your website for the clinic, you must be attending SearchCamp Philly. Please email siteclinic [at] searchcampphilly [dot] com, with the subject B2C Site Clinic)
• Entrepenaur Website Clinic: Are you an entrepenaur? Just kicking off your website? Wondering what you have to do to be found in the search engines? This session will look at 2 Entrepenaur websites and the panelists will give feeback on how to improve the site. (To enter your website for the clinic, you must be attending SearchCamp Philly. Please email siteclinic [at] searchcampphilly [dot] com, with the subject ENT Site Clinic)

Advanced Online Marketing Sessions

• SEM on a ShoeString Budget: Have limited funds to run a huge marketing campaign. Don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on PPC a month? This session is designed for the small business owner in mind. Tips and strategies for businesses with a budget on how to be successful in online marketing.
• Keyword Research: How do you decide what keywords are good to market and optimize for? Do I go for short term goals, or long term return? Business names or general search tearms. This sessions is designed to go over keyword research and some tools you can use.
• Corporate Blogging: Should your CEO Blog? Should your corporate executives blog? What should you blog about? How often should you blog? Debbie Weil, author of the corporate blogging book discusses the ins and outs of blogging for corporations.
• Social Media & PR: Public Relations can just jump right into Social Media right? Any public relations firm can do social media, right? Wrong on both accounts. Social Media is a totally different channel of communication to audiences and consumers, one that must be taken with caution. This session is designed to help PR companies, and Marketing departments understand why Social Media isn't just another place to dump a press release.
• How Not To Get Ripped Off by Search Firms: Has a search company promised you a top ten ranking, or a number one ranking in Google? How about those emails saying they haven't seen your site in the search engines? Wil Reylnolds goes over some key things to keep in mind when hiring a search firm to outsource your SEO and PPC to.
• Why Flash Sites Aren't Good For Search & Usability Google can read Flash now, that's great, right!? Hold your horses there bucko! Usability expert Kim Krause Berg discusses the hows, whys and why nots of using flash with your websites, and how to get the most out of flash if you decide you want to use it.
• How Do Search Engine Spiders Work? How do the spiders/crawlers from the search engines crawl your website? How do they know what to look for, when to come back. What are the common blockades and trip-ups that the crawlers have when they come to websites. Learn all about the spiders/crawlers during this session.
• Blog Clinics: We have two blogs clinics at Search Camp Philly, one on each day of the conference and within each clinic panelists will select two blogs to go over in a session and give tips on optimizing, promotion and community building. (To enter your website for the clinic, you must be attending SearchCamp Philly. Please email siteclick [at] searchcampphilly [dot] com, with the subject Blog Clinic)
• Building Communities: How in the world do blogs get thousands of subsribers? How do forums sign up hundreds of new users a day? How do Twitterers end up with over a thousand followers? It's all about building communities. This session highlights some easy tips and strategies you can implement to build your own community.
• Monetizing You Blog: You've got a blog and you want to know now, how to make money off of it? Google's Adsense Network, Affiliate Marketing, what do you choose? This sessions goes over the different types of programs you can use to monetize your blog, if you aren't blogging to promote your company.
• SEO vs. PPC. Vs. Social Media: Do I give up my PPC campaign for SEO? How about scaling back SEO in lieu of Social Media? This sessions has three experts giving tips on how to leverage on marketing medium to another for the best results for your online marketing strategy.
• Website Architecture: Is your website search engine spider friendly? Do you have "spider traps" somewhere within your site that scares the spiders away? Do you have data redudancy issues? How about too many parameters in your URLs? This is all website architecture and this sessions gives you some great strategies for ensuring you've got the right architecture for your search marketing efforts.
• Link Building: You've heard that linking is what its all about in ranking in the search engines. That is partially true, its one piece of the big puzzle, but it's a big piece. This session goes over some linking basics - dos and don'ts so you don't jeporadize your site and its online marketing efforts.
• Great Linkbait Through Content Building: How do you create great linkbait? Through building great content first. This session will walk you through how to build great content that ends up producing some great linkbait for your site.
• Is Email Marketing Dead? Think email marketing is dead? You might be surprised! This sessions goes over why effective and honest email marketing campaigns aren't landing in the spam bin and are converting at some phenonminal rates.
• Social News, Bookmarking & Search: Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Mixx, what are they all about and how do they affect search? This sessions gives you the basics of social news sites and social bookmarking sites and their importance to search marketing, not to mention branding and linking.
• Search's Past, Present & Future: Kevin Ryan, of Search Engine Strategies gives a great overview of where search has come in the past year, as well as a look into where its going. Kevin's one of the leading minds in search and head of the global search marketing conference Search Engine Strategies, and has knowledge from a global perspective local marketers can use in their own businesses here in Philly.
• Twitter & Plurk - MicroBlogging to the Extreme: Twitter, Plurk... what the heck?! Wondering what all these are? Its called Microblogging and its taking the search and social media industries by storm. This session is designed to go over the basics of these Web 2.0 technologies and how marketers can effectively leverage them in their online marketing campaigns.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for Non Profts: Are you a non-profit organization and looking for help with your online marketing strategies? This sessions is lead by non-profit search marketing expert Greg Meyers who will gives some tips and strategies non-profits can utilize in both SEO and PPC campaigns.

For more information about SearchCamp Philly email press {a-t symbol} searchcampphilly [dot] com