What’s a key element to effective search engine optimization that leads to increased customer acquisition through search? In the immortal words of Steve Ballmer: developers (and also developers, developers, etc.).

SMX Advanced, the always-awesome advanced search marketing conference, is coming up in Seattle on June 2nd and 3rd. Last year, I programmed a developer day that brought developers and search marketers together around technical SEO issues. We continued the dive into web infrastructure issues at SMX West in February. This year, SMX Advanced features great advanced online marketing content and an all-new In House SEM Exchange, and some of you asked if this year included content for developers, since we aren’t doing a separate developer day.

I’m happy to report that we’ve just added a developer-focused session and events and have put together a recommend itinerary of the agenda to provide developers with a list of the sessions that will interest them the most.

So if you’re:

• a developer who wants to add to your marketable skill set and learn more about building search-friendly web sites
• an engineering entrepreneur who wants to make sure you are building your web application so that potential customers can easily find you for free
• A developer in a large organization who wants to build search-friendly code into the development process
• A search marketer who works closely with developers

Then you don’t want to miss this special itinerary at SMX Advanced. If you’re a search marketer planning to attend the conference, bring along your developers and come away from the conference with a shared understanding of how best to work together to build SEO into the entire marketing and development process.

I’m a developer? Why do I need to know about SEO? Isn’t that for marketing?

Search is the primary navigation method on the web, so if your site can’t be easily found in search engines, you’re losing substantial customer acquisition opportunities. A key element in being found in search engines is the site’s technical architecture. If you are a web developer, the ability to create search-friendly technical architecture is a valuable skillset. If you are launching a web startup, you want to attract as many customers as possible, and being easily found in search is a great way to do that for free.

What can I expect as a developer attending SMX Advanced?

The developer itinerary outlined below can give you the foundation you need to ensure your site’s technical implementation improves rather than hinders the ablity of potential customers to find you from searching.

We’ve added a special session and Q&A time just for developers, as well as provided a suggested path through the agenda with sessions that focus on technical implementation, diagnosing issues, and overall site architecture for optimal search engine crawling and indexing.

Remember, you’re free to attend any session you’d like and havefull access to all sessions and networking events. But the recommended path for developers is:

Day 1:

Jane and Robot Presents SEO Overview for Developers
This special session is intended to give developers an overview of how search engines work and the important element to consider for search engine optimization (SEO) when building web infrastructure. This introduction will set the stage for later sessions that will dive into the details of each technical element.

Learn about how search engines work, including discovery, crawling, extraction, indexing, ranking, and display. Find out about the most important technical elements for effective search acquisition. Topics include developing a crawlable infrastructure, building rich internet applications, URL rewriting, redirection, and canonicalization.

See examples of how things can be done well and how things can go really, really wrong. Topics include building search-friendly search architecture, including  URL structure, rich media (such as Flash, video, AJAX), and managing bots.

Duplicate Content Solutions and the Canonical Tag
Many site infrastructure scenarios introduce duplicate content, which can hinder effective search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking. The search engines can’t efficiently crawl the site, which can lead to less of the site being indexed, and links pointing to multiple versionis of content can cause PageRank dilution, which can lead to lowered rankings.

Tracking codes on URLs, parameters for sort orders, separate pages for very similar items (such as identical products in different colors), and page revision history (such as a wiki-style site that provides access to earlier versions of pages) can all cause these duplicate content issues.

Recently, the search engines introduced a new tool to help combat duplicate content issues: the canonical tag. This session looks and how the tag has been performing for some webmasters plus revisits other duplicate content tools and techniques.

SEO Ranking Factors in 2009
How much does that H1 tag really matter, versus the number of links pointing at a domain? Do “authority” sites always have an advantage over other sites with less reputation. Is brand recognition now a bigger issue? This session looks at on-the-page and off-the-page factors that influence web search, to understand what remains useful and what new signals are growing in importance.

Is Your Hosting Ready For Social Media Success?
Congratulations! You just made it to the home page of Digg. And seconds later, your server crashed, taking with it the chance for all those eyeballs to see your content. In this session, a look at how to ensure that your hosting provider and content management systems are ready for what social media might send, when something goes viral.

You&A With Matt Cutts
What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.

Day 2:

Keynote Q&A: Dr. Qi Lu, President, Online Services Division, Microsoft
Dr. Qi Lu took the helm of Microsoft’s search efforts in January. Now six months into his new role, during this keynote Q&A with Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, Lu shares in this some of the changes that have been made to Microsoft Live Search and where the company intends to head in the search space.

Conducting an SEO Audit to Troubleshoot Problems and Tune-Up Performance
Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.

Flash and Search
Flash content has historically been problematic for search engines to index, although it’s been nearly a year since Google & Yahoo gained more support to index Flash content. This session takes a close look at how that’s playing out in real life. Can you just leave it to the crawlers to understand Flash now? Do you still need to consider alternatives to help them? Get up to speed on the current state of how search engines interact with Flash.

Mega Session: SEO Vets Take All Comers
This PowerPoint-free panel is made up of veteran search engine optimization experts taking questions on SEO issues. Put your biggest challenges to them and come away with solutions.

Jane and Robot Presents After-Hours Technical Q&A with the Experts
After two days of tech sessions, get answers to all of your technical questions from our panel of experts. Stay tuned for more details!

Networking and Topic Tables

In addition to all of this great content, you’ll have access to all networking events and topic-focused lunch tables on both days. We’ll have industry leaders in search and development leading discussions and Q&A during lunch for additional opportunities to get your technical search questions answered.

Use discount code jr@SMX for 10% off registration.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Blog, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.