| Presenting the #MozCon 2011 Agenda Posted: 15 Jun 2011 08:31 AM PDT Posted by jennita Over the past couple months, we've had lots of  people asking about the full agenda for MozCon. Well my friends, I'm super excited to announce that the agenda is complete! As Rand mentioned in his initial post, we have a ridiculously amazing speaker lineup. Where else can you get the likes of Avinash Kaushik from Market Motive, Melanie Mitchell from Digitas, Alex Schultz from Facebook, Stefan Weitz from Bing and so many others in one place for three days of online marketing training. No, but seriously. For only $899 (PRO members), you get 3 days of training, networking, breakfast, lunch and get a first hand glimpse at something we're launching at Mozcon. Whee! Ok, so let's jump right into this agenda. Take a gander, then head on over to register! Oh, and if you're not PRO & want the PRO price, sign up here.  
What To Expect - Learn advanced strategies and techniques from the most respected authorities on SEO
- Preview new SEOmoz PRO features before anyone else and provide feedback to guide its future
- Network with SEO and online marketing professionals from all over the world and meet the MozStaff
Full Agenda Day 1: July 27, 2011 - 8:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
- 9:00am - 9:05am
 Introduction to MozCon- Speaker: Rand Fishkin
- Format: 5 minute informal presentation
- 9:05am - 9:30am
- Unveiling SEOmoz’s Latest Project
- Speaker: Rand Fishkin
- Description: This long-awaited project is going to make lives easier and better for SEOs everywhere. We can’t wait to share it with you the morning of launch day!
- Format: 25 minute formal presentation, No Q+A
- 9:30am - 10:00am
 Maximizing the Power of Retargeting- Speaker: Joanna Lord
- Description: This new form of advertising has low adoption and high ROI - our favorite kind of opportunity. Joanna will show you not only how retargeting works, but how to maximize your return and get creative with available options.
- Format: 22 minute formal presentation, 8 minute Q+A
- 10:00am - 11:00am
- Turning Google Places Pain into Gain
- Speaker: David Mihm
- Description: Local, maps and places has always held great opportunity for those who know how to execute. In this presentation, one of the leading authorities on Google Places, David Mihm, will show how to take advantage of the strange twists, turns and awkward missteps in Google’s local offering to earn rankings and traffic from local queries.
- Format: 45 minute formal presentation, 15 minute Q+A
- 11:00am - 11:15am
- 11:15am - 12:00pm
- Design that Drives Action
- Speaker: Bryan Zmijewski
- Description: Bryan’s experience with dozens of the world’s most transformative startups has given him unique insight into how users behave on the web and what drives lifecycles of customer success. In this talk, he’ll dive deep into the psychology of web users and show powerful examples to help illustrate how marketers can think beyond a single landing page and earn powerful bumps in sales through conversion actions.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 12:00pm - 12:35pm
- Insanely Creative Ways to Make Your Audience Spread the Word
- Speaker: Bob Rains
- Description: Few people on the planet have held such diverse and interesting positions as Bob Rains, and even fewer have had his success. Bob’s talk will share amazingly cool creative strategies and how to overcome internal + external roadblocks that would seek to impede a great marketer’s ideas.
- Format: 25 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 12:35pm - 1:30pm Lunch
- 1:30pm - 2:15pm
- Automating + Scaling Keyword Research
- Speaker: Richard Baxter
- Description: How to take keyword data and turn it into a scalable, high-converting information architecture has always been a massive challenge. No more. Richard’s talk centers on a repeatable framework and methodology for solving this vexing problem for sites of any size.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 2:15pm - 2:45pm
- Forget the Ads: How to Brand “Organically”
- Speaker: Jamie Steven
- Description: As SEOs, we’ve often left branding strategy and tactics to others. With the convergence of search, social and usage data, it’s clear that a great SEO strategy needs a great brand. In this talk, Jamie will share practical, actionable tips for how technical marketers can use branding to win the search rankings, social sharing and all of organic web marketing.
- Format: 22 minute formal presentation, 8 minute Q+A
- 2:45pm - 3:00pm
- 3:00pm - 3:45pm
- Content Strategy: What Works (and What Doesn’t)
- Speaker: Ian Lurie
- Description: Get an inside look at the content creation strategy used by Portent to make their clients mores successful on the web. Ian will share how his agency has produced works that have earned links, rankings, social sharing and conversions and how you can repeat this process yourself.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 3:45pm - 4:30pm
- International SEO: Analyzing What Makes a Site Rank in One Country vs. Another
- Speaker: Hannah Smith
- Description: In addition to providing actionable advice on how best to tackle International SEO; with the help of Distilled’s talented research team, Hannah sets out to prove which international ranking factors are really important; and therefore how to leverage the right signals to achieve multi-nation dominance (or the right single nation targeting).
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 4:30pm - 5:15pm
- Marketing Smarter, Not Harder: Real World Bootstrappers that Won and the Tactics that Got them There
- Speaker: Tony Wright
- Description: Whether you're marketing for a big brand or an upstart, you're often asked to produce results with limited funding and support. Tony will walk through real world David and Goliath stories where under-resourced marketing efforts got outsized results.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 8:00pm - Midnight
- SEO Meetup! More details to come
Day 2: July 28, 2011 - 8:00am - 9:00am Breakfast
- 9:00am - 9:45am
- How to Earn Outsized Returns in Paid Search
- Speaker: Bill Leake
- Description: The problem with PPC is always the price. Bids are too high, competition is too tough and it’s unfeasible to get a truly high ROI from buying paid search ads anymore, right? Wrong. Using creativity and uncommon tactics, Bill’s devised and will share awesome ways to get around the competition and do remarkable things, even in a budget-constrained environment.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 9:45am - 10:30am
- Schema-ing: How to Catch the Wave for the Next Generation Web
- Speaker: Stefan Weitz
- As the director of Bing, Stefan’s insanely qualified to truly predict the future of web search. In this presentation, he’ll be sharing the next generation of data + metrics the engines will care about and how we, as marketers, can prepare early and win big.
- Format: 30 minute formal presentation, 15 minute Q+A
- 10:30am - 10:45am
- 10:45am - 11:30am
- Long Tail SEO in a Post-Panda World
- Speaker: Matthew Brown
- Description: Now that Google’s punishing content farms and judging the usefulness, design, layout and happiness generated by our pages, long tail SEO is riskier than ever. Unless... you listen to Matt, who’ll share battle-hardened techniques for winning the tail.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 11:30am - 12:00pm
- Paid+Organic: Better Together
- Speaker: Melanie Mitchell
- Description: When your brand and/or generic terms rank #1 in organic search, it’s wise to ignore paid search, right? Not necessarily... Melanie will walk you through the pros and cons using in-depth case studies of how to leverage the power of running both paid and organic search together to maximize performance... even if you rank in the top results of organic search.
- Format: 22 minute formal presentation, 8 minute Q+A
- 12:00pm - 1:00pm Lunch
- 1:00pm - 2:00pm
- How to Earn the Links the Lazy Link Builders Buy
- Speaker: Wil Reynolds
- Description: Sure, you could go buy those links and risk your site’s standing with Google (and your SEO reputation). Or, you could follow Wil’s always creative, engaging and passionate advice for how to earn links the white-hat, long-term way.
- Format: 45 minute formal presentation, 15 minute Q+A
- 2:00pm - 2:45pm
- Oyster Hotels: A Case Study in SEO
- Speaker: Eytan Seidman
- Description: In 2007, Eytan left his role as search engineer at Microsoft and moved to the startup world, where he took on the remarkably competitive hotels vertical. 4 years later, Oyster.com is one of the most successful travel startups on the web and Oyster’s rankings are consistently in the top 10. See what worked, what didn’t and which metrics mattered in this remarkable story.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 2:45pm - 3:15pm
- Leveraging Community for SEO + Social Boosts
- Speaker: Jen Lopez
- Description: Jen Lopez has proven herself to be among an elite group of web community managers. In the last 2 years, she moved from an SEO consulting role to scaling SEOmoz’s social, site and search profiles to astounding heights. Learn how she does her job, including the tools, processes and metrics that matter for success.
- Format: 22 minute formal presentation, 8 minute Q+A
- 3:15pm - 3:30pm
- 3:30pm - 4:15pm
- Conversion Rate Optimisation: Developing A Process To Increase Market Share
- Speaker: Stephen Pavlovich
- Description: To be great at conversions requires hundreds of right moves and few of the wrong ones. It’s a complex, challenging art, but Stephen’s done it successfully for dozens of sites and, in this presentation, will walk through the process that’s brought his clients massive improvements in visitor:conversion ratio.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 4:15pm - 5:00pm
- Facebook’s Hidden Marketing Opportunities
- Speaker: Alex Schultz
- Description: As director on Facebook’s Growth team, Alex knows the Facebook platform like few others. In this talk, he’ll share the hidden corners of social tools, APIs and marketing opportunities and provide actionable tips that every site can use to reach more than 500 million web users.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 5:00pm - 5:30pm
- 6:30pm - Midnight
- Party at the Garage! (see photos below from last year!)
 
Day 3: July 29, 2011 - 8:30am - 9:30am Breakfast
- 9:30am - 10:30am
- How Big Brands Can Compete in Tough SERPs without Risk
- Speaker: Adam Audette
- Description: The temptation is always there - just spend $50K/month and you, too, could have pages of middling quality and low interest levels ranking atop the results. The reality is that real risk and unsustainability accompanies link buying and other gray/black hat practices. In his presentation, Adam will show how big brands, including those that are his clients, achieve remarkable results while staying entirely within the search guidelines. He’ll provide specific, repeatable alternatives to cloaking, link manipulation and overly-aggressive SEO so you can provide a great experience for both users and engines.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 10:30am - 11:15am
- TBD
- Speaker: Martin MacDonald
- Description: TBD
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 11:15am - 12:00pm
- Going Viral on Facebook: How to Earn Gobs of Likes + Shares
- Speaker: Merry Morud
- Description: At Aimclear, folks know social media marketing like the back of their hand. Merry’s here to share that knowledge and show how to design a strategy and execute tactically to win the hearts and minds of those on Facebook.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 12:00pm - 1:00pm
- 1:00pm - 1:45pm
- How to Brainstorm + Design the Best, Most Viral Content You’ve Ever Made
- Speaker: Kate Morris
- Description: Once you’ve got the right idea and a plan to execute, building viral content is easy (OK, maybe not easy, but easier). Kate’s here to help with those first two steps - finding the right niches of content to fill and designing the blueprints for great content. With her actionable advice, you’ll be able to generate remarkable works that will carry your brand far and wide.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 1:45pm - 2:45pm
- Measure the Right Things and Achieve Magical, Analytics Awesomeness
- Speaker: Avinash Kaushik
- Description: As marketers, we often fall in love with the wrong metrics and optimize/report in ways that don’t move the business goals forward. In this talk, Avinash will show a simple, powerful process to focus on and measure the right metrics, then customize your tools to make magical awesomeness an everyday event.
- Format: 45 minute formal presentation, 15 minute Q+A
- 2:45pm - 3:00pm
- 3:00pm - 3:45pm
- Social Design: How to Co-Mingle Social Features & Earn Traffic
- Speaker: Mat Clayton
- Description: Facebook, Twitter and other sites offer embeddable features that can have a remarkable impact on your site’s ability to gain both social traffic and sharing/liking metrics. Learn from Mat’s impressive repertoire of case studies on how to make the new, embeddable power of social media yours.
- Format: 35 minute formal presentation, 10 minute Q+A
- 3:45pm - 5:00pm
- Head to Head: Stealing from the Web’s Best
- Speakers: Rand Fishkin + Will Critchlow
- Description: For this, Will + Rand’s 6th head to head battle, they’ll be taking a line from Picasso: “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” Watch as they compete for the best presentation by showing off amazing marketing tactics of all kinds from dozens of the web’s most illustrious success stories. From remarkable uses of data to fiendishly clever social strategies to email, display, design + more, Will and Rand will pull out all the stops to win your vote (held directly following their talks) for best presentation.
- Format: 2 X 35 minute presentations, 5 mins vote tallying, No Q+A
- 5:00pm - 6:00pm
- “Give it Up”
- Speakers: All in Attendance
- Format: 2 minute tip from each speaker + 30 min Q+A
- 6:00pm - Whenever
What People Are Saying Check out what some of our attendees from last year said about the conference! The SEOmoz Training Seminar is an important event that cannot be missed. Every year I walk away with great resources and fantastic tools that I can implement immediately. Hands down the best professional event I've ever attended! Tons of practical, relevant content with no fluff. A must-attend for any SEO. Jeff Perkins SEO Product Manager Eventful Before the SEOmoz PRO training I had some seriously technical questions and was satisfied to leave the conference with all of them answered. Not only were the presentations phenomenal but the networking opportunities were perhaps once in a lifetime. Engaging and interactive speakers, simple decks, and outstanding concepts. This content is mandatory for quality SEO but is profoundly relevant to the larger task of strategically positioning any company to the globally-connected community. Whew! Are you wowed yet? Because I sure am. This is one amazing agenda! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments. We look forward to seeing you in Seattle! Do you like this post? Yes No  |
| 5 Warning Signs of a Bad SEO Client Posted: 14 Jun 2011 05:51 PM PDT Posted by jsturgeon This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. I just walked away from a lot of money. After two months of research, proposals, and negotiations I turned down a deal that would have brought my freelance income to a new level. But I would have been miserable. My prospective client had no shortage of funds. There was nothing shady about their business. I just didn't want to deal with them. I used to say "yes" to everything. I took on any client that would sign on the dotted line. In my zealousness to build a business, I neglected to find the "right" clients and settled for anyone who would cut a check. This led to sleepless nights, wasted time, and poor results. In my opinion, a successful business deal isn't just getting paid. Success is when both parties (client and consultant) can agree on realistic goals; once those goals are met, both are satisfied with the results. You are the professional. You know what will work and what won't work. If you give the client whatever they ask for, it's not going to help their business in the end. Learn how to balance input from the client about their industry and business goals with a reasonable plan of action that you produce. Value your time...and the client's. In my recent experience, I made the mistake of conducting keyword research and competitive analysis for free. I did this as an act of good faith, since there was a lot of business on the table. But without any skin in the game, the prospective client was indecisive and nit-picky over just about everything. TAKEAWAY: If you are in negotiations and want to sweeten the deal, charge for your research upfront. If the client signs, then you can credit a percentage of that fee towards the first month of their bill. Treat it like a deposit. Essentially, my prospective client wanted me to act as an SEO machine, where he remained firmly at the controls. He wanted a puppet that he could manipulate based on tips he's read online (but never actually implemented). Not a road I wanted to take. In spite of this lost opportunity (or avoided disaster depending on how you see it), I have come away with a short list of red flags, which I'm hoping will protect you from getting involved with clients who will waste your time and energy. Seriously, sometimes the paycheck really isn't worth the blood, sweat and tears you will invest. 5 Warning Signs of a Bad SEO Client: - They name-drop books, blogs, and other SEO-related materials in nearly every conversation.
- They insist on web design gimmicks that detract from the user experience.
- They demand results on an unrealistic time table.
- They protest your rates on the basis that there are, "tons of SEO software options available on ClickBank for $97".
- They ask for keyword research and then override your findings with their "sense" of what their firm should rank for.
Looking forward to hearing your additions to this list! p.s. from Rand: This post got a lot of positive reactions, and has some great comments, too, so we're sending it to the main blog. I can empathize here myself, having run a barely-scraping-by consulting business for the first 6 years of my career (1999-2005). Do you like this post? Yes No  |
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