O’Reilly Found conference is a conference for web developers about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You can learn how to build search-friend code using a variety of technologies including ASP.NET, IIS, Apache, Silverlight, PHP, Drupal, Wordpress, AJAX, and Flash.
While developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity, technical architecture has now become critical for search success. O’Reilly Found is the authoritative place to discover best practices for this industry and gain a thorough understanding of why search-friendly architecture is absolutely mission-critical to businesses of all sizes. No spammy tricks. Just solid foundational coding tactics and actionable data that will ensure search engines can easily crawl, index, and rank your site’s content.
What: O’Reilly Found Search Conference
Where: San Francisco Airport Marriott, Burlingame, CA
When: June 9-11, 2009 – Early registration ends April 21.
Website: http://en.oreilly.com/found/
Agenda for O’Reilly Found Search Conference
Here’s a list of sessions scheduled for the O’Reilly Found Conference 2009.
Developing For Search Engines Is Developing For Users – In this keynote, Danny Sullivan talks about the need to consider search engine friendliness not just to drive traffic to your site but to ensure you’re developing right for your visitors.
Technical SEO Issues – This session provides an overview of how search engines work an highlights the important element to consider for search engine optimization (SEO) when building web infrastructure. This session will set the stage for later sessions that will dive into the details of each technical element.
Building SEO-Friendly Site Architecture – In this session you’ll learn about all the best practices for building web pages that search engines can easily understand, increasing your opportunity for search traffic.
URLs, Domains, and Redirects – In this session you will learn about the single most import aspect of SEO: the accessibility of your URL structure. Without this, a search engine can’t get to your website to crawl it or rate it.
Assessing Your Site for Potential SEO Pitfalls – Learn the process for evaluating the technical components of your site. Establish a benchmark and make a prioritized plan for improvement.
Understanding Search Engine Guidelines and Penalties – With increased competition and a rough economy, many businesses are finding it tougher than ever to stand out online and reach potential customers… often pushing the envelope trying to optimize their online presence. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, will share what you need to know to minimize risks for your legitimate business.
Making SEO Part of the Development Process – The days of optimizing individual pages are over and the companies who are winning the optimization game are doing so via scale by integrating search sooner into the content creation workflow. Panel members will contribute how they have integrated search into the workflow and the increased value they got from it.
Architecture for E-Commerce Websites – E-commerce sites have to manage thousands (and sometimes millions) of database entries and have duplicate content and URL issues to overcome, along with a number of other issues. Learn how to optimize your e-commerce site for effective search acquisition.
Building Your SEO Strategy and Analytics Into Your Content Management System – This session will provide suggestions for how to integrate your SEO strategy and metrics into your content management system – and into the hands of the people who can make an impact. This session will also use lessons learned from Wikipedia to highlight ways you can modify your content management system for improved search benefit.
How to Make Your Wordpress Blog Search Engine Friendly – Wordpress is one of the most popular and powerful blogging platforms in use today. However "out of the box" its set up isn’t optimal for search engine optimization. This session will give guidelines on how to configure your setup to make it more search engine friendly. It will also discuss plugins that extend the functionality of your wordpress installation for greater search engine compatibility.
Geo-Targeting, User Tracking and other Advanced Technical Issues – In this session Vanessa Fox (co-chair of O’Reilly Found) and Matt Cutts (Google) will each discuss an advanced design pattern that could significantly impact your company’s search acquisition.
Best Practices for PHP and Apache – There are several dozen ways that servers can be configured, and websites coded, that can create Duplicate Content problems. This can cause search engines multiple issues in spidering, indexing, and ranking your content. This workshop will explore the issues, and show some ‘best practice’ techniques that can be baked-in to your next web-based project.
Search-Friendly AJAX and JavaScript – AJAX techniques, if not implemented properly can have many search engine crawling issues. Links and content may not be visible due to the nature of AJAX having content pulled by JavaScript. The AJAX techniques discussed here are methods on making AJAX pages crawlable and content readable avoiding any SEO issues involved with AJAX and JavaScript.
Optimizing Video and Images – Multimedia can provide great opportunities for harnessing search acquisition as well as large potential pitfalls. Find out how to best optimize multimedia such as images and video to maximize visibility and customers from both web search and vertical (image and video specific) search.
Search-Friendly Adobe Flash – Flash has a reputation for hampering search indexing and ranking. Recent technology advances by Google and Abode have improved the indexing of Flash content, but better methods are available. Learn how to include Flash in a website without sacrificing search performance.
Search Engine Tools for Webmasters – Are you using the full potential of webmaster resources from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo? In this panel, you’ll learn about Sitemaps: When should you use them and what types are available; communication: How the different engines interact with webmasters; and tools: what can you do with each engine’s webmaster toolset?
How Marketing and Development Can Work Together Effectively – As the internet continues to level the playing field, small businesses need to make sure that their site planning is up to snuff. This session will provide concrete examples of how proper planning amongst all departments can help the Davids compete with the Goliaths – and come out ahead.
SEO Best Practices for ASP.Net and IIS – The .NET development platform has created challenges for a spider indexing pages to optimize visibility. This class reviews ways to work-around or even eliminate those challenges, such as the ‘view state,’ ‘JavaScript Links’ and ‘Invalid IDs’ to best utilize Microsoft’s languages for search engine optimization.
Semantic Content and the Future of Search – As the semantic Web grows in size and scope, the question of SEO on this new landscape is growing as well. There is no doubt the semantic Web will hold vastly different implications for the Web community. A panel of experts in the space, including Powerset, will discuss why the semantic Web is an exciting new frontier that will use tagging and semantic analysis to change the way we look at SEO.
Implementing Google’s First Click Free Program – Marshall Simmonds from The New York Times Company/About.com will show how NYT and WSJ.com have implemented Google’s First-Click Free program. They will talk about the challenges they faced that lead them to evaluate the program, their experiences implementing it on their sites, and the impact it has had on their business.
Managing Robots – Robots.txt provides a fairly complex language for directing how search engine bots crawl and index your site. Other robots may need alternate techniques for management. This session describes how to use robots.txt to your best advantage and how to secure your site to other bots that might take unnecessary bandwidth or content.
Power Your Site with Microsoft Live Search – Live Search API 2.0 allows developers and publishers to power their sites with customized, flexible site and web search. Come check out how you can gain access to a rich set of content types, including news, instant answers, query suggestions, Virtual Earth maps, plus the opportunity to monetize with ad-serving.
Architecting Search-Friendly Flash – Come and join Adobe’s Duane Nickull as he takes you through a world of tips, tricks, best practices and black magic to understand Ichabod, deep linking and shares some of his own personal tricks (such as XHTML data providers) to help alleviate some common problems. You can also bring a laptop and code along to some of the labs to get a better idea of how to write code to make this work.
Harnessing User Generated Content – User Generated Content (UGC) is fantastic for search engines as a free source of unique content. But how do you make sure this content lives up to its search engine ranking potential? This session will look at best practices in getting your users to properly optimize their content, both on page and off page.
Understanding Your Business with Analytics – Learn how to use web analytics like a pro, to understand your business and customers from the inside out. Stop swimming in data and start driving meaning out of your web analytics. Learn more about the customer acquisition points that really matter through every step of the conversion funnel.
Changing the Face of Search – Nick Cox, Senior Product Manager of the Yahoo! Search team, and lead on Yahoo! SearchMonkey, will talk about the next generation of search and what open search platforms mean for developers and site owners.
Introduction to Search Marketing for Engineers – This workshop will introduce you to all of the major topics and terminology in the marketing field. It will include an introduction to organic optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), social media marketing, keyword research, and link building. The speakers will also dispel some common myths and provide a framework for thinking about the value SEO can provide to your company.
Understanding Your Customers through Keyword Research – Customers tell us almost everything about themselves when they use search engines to answer their every needs. Learn about the tools and processes you need to harvest this information to segment your audience, understand their needs, and build the most compelling products and marketing campaigns to bring them to your site and maximize conversions.
Building High Quality Links – Establishing a growing set of high quality inbound links to your site is an essential ingredient in getting traffic to your website, both from potential customers clicking through, as well as from search engine referral traffic. Come learn about the art and the science of how to inspire the community and other websites to create relevant links pointing to your website.
Tools for Diagnosing Root Causes of Search Optimization Issues – Learn about all of the different tools that the professionals use to diagnose SEO issues within websites. This workshop cover some basic troubleshooting process information, demonstrating the best tools to use in each case. Many of the tools are available as plug-ins for Firefox, and all of them are free.
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