8:45 - A brief introduction and overview of PubCon.

Guy's journey from law school dropout to hugely successful venture capitalist has been dotted along the way with stops in the diamond jewelry business, Apple Computers, and a few software companies.

Guy is inspiring, thought-provoking, motivational, timely, and long overdue to make an appearance as a keynote speaker for our bedrock attendees. Guy doesn't read much about the leading edge - Guy lives the leading edge and helps bring it to life. Guy is tomorrow's news today.

Come to a keynote where the presenter will leave you fired up about your own products and possibilities.

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures

In 2001, Brett was surprised to get a call by a major search engine wanting to hire a search engine optimization specialist. He thought they were trying to hire someone for index quality and spam control. He learned quickly that they were looking for someone to help optimize their own sites to perform better in all the search engines.

It turns out that just because a programmer can write a search engine algo, it doesn't mean they can reverse-engineer that algo from a web page. Their own people need some training and help getting pages indexed and ranked well from time to time.

This panel will discuss how and when search engines SEO their own sites and what optimizers and site owners can learn from their experiences.

Moderator: Jake Baillie
Speakers:
Dave Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc
Melanie Mitchell, SVP of Search Strategy, Digitas
Joseph Morin, CEO & Co-Founder, Social Rewards, Inc.
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist, Google

From search engine advertising to banner ads, writing quality content can be a challenge. And getting people to click on that ad can be even tougher. This session will look at ways to increase the performance of your paid advertising solutions.

Moderator: Christine Churchill
Speakers:
Brad Geddes, Founder, bgTheory.com
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Lily Chiu, Senior Sales Engineer, Omniture
Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC

This session has been declared a "presentation-free zone." This panel consists of a group of real world optimizers and SEO/SEM marketers. These expert panelists are going to talk about SEO/SEM and how to best do these activities in groups and teams.

Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Brant Bukowsky, ,
Heather Lloyd-Martin, President and CEO, SuccessWorks
Jessica L Bowman, Founder & President, SEOinhouse.com

Today's search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Owen Byrne, Co-Founder, digg
Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google
Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix
Niall Kennedy, Founder, Niall Kennedy

Which of the following statements is true:
(a) You are who your links say you are
(b) You are who you link to
(c) Other
(d) All of the above

The panelists in this session are experts on linking, and will take a critical look at linking strategies, including: outbound link optimization, outsourcing link building, old fashioned linking via directories, and hiring a in-house link developer.

Moderator: Greg Niland
Speakers:
Rae Hoffman, CEO, Outspoken Media
Eric Ward, CEO, Eric Ward
Roger Montti, Founder and Owner, martinibuster.com
Joel Lesser, President CEO, LinksManager

Large-scale bid management can be an overwhelming job. How do you handle thousands upon tens of thousands of keywords? (Hint: if you answered "it can't be done without going crazy or letting things slip along the way," then this session is a must-attend for you!) These panelists will discuss all of the important issues that crop up when dealing with large site paid advertising.


Moderator: David Karandish
Speakers:
Chris Zaharias, VP SearchCenter, Omniture
Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman, Didit.com
Aaron Shear, Director of SEO with Shopping.com, Shopping.com an eBay Company

The panelists in this session will take a look at off-the-shelf programs that make life easier for the affiliate and SEO/SEM webmaster.

Moderator: Jake Baillie
Speakers:
Alex Bennert, In-house SEO, Wall Street Journal
Derek Vaughan, Vice President of Marketing, HostMySite.com
Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com

Content is evolving quickly on the web today. Tagging, press releases, forums, blogs - you name it - we can optimize it. This panel knows all of the tricks and tips for optimizing new content and will introduce you to alternative avenues of optimization.

Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., Searching for Profit
Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
Greg Hartnett, President, Best of The Web

Yahoo's search ad platform is undergoing a major change from the pure bid-for-placement system many marketers have long known. In this panel, Yahoo!s experts will provide an overview of the new platform that began rolling out last month, the new features and tools, and the upcoming changes to be expected from “Project Panama.” In addition, Yahoo! will spend plenty of time answering questions from the audience about what's to come and how things will work.

This session is all about content, copy writing, and finding the balance with search engine-friendly design. Our panelists will talk about managing the chaos between keywords and linguists and using content to help hit (and exceed) your conversion targets.


Moderator: Ted Ulle
Speakers:
Heather Lloyd-Martin, President and CEO, SuccessWorks
Jennifer Slegg, President, JenSense
Ted Ulle, Senior Search Analyst, Converseon, Inc.
Byron White, Founder and President, LifeTips.com

A top-down look at the auction-style advertising strategy that has become standard across search engines. Panelists from the major search engines are invited to speak openly about different options, new offerings, and upcoming promotions from their services.

Moderator: Christine Churchill
Speakers:
Daniel Boberg, Managing Director, Sales Technology, Yahoo! Search
Frederick Vallaeys, SR. Product Specialist for AdWords, Google
Mel Carson, adCenter Community Manager, Microsoft

What makes an online market a highly competitive one? How can we hope to survive when many vendors compete for the same customer? Come to this session to hear real world cases from the bleeding edge affiliate sectors.

A favorable trajectory: initially you worked as a marketing arm for the vendor. Then you and the vendor worked hand in hand to get more clients and split the revenues. Finally, the vendor is working for you as an operational sales and fulfillment service on a cost + revenue basis.

Moderator: Jake Baillie
Speakers:
David Rivero, ,
Matt Tuens, Founder & CEO, AcuVox
Elisabeth Archambault, Freelance Affiliate Marketer, Wedding-Resources
John Coronella, Internet Marketing Consultant, OnlineMarketer

This session will look at issues that crop up when dealing with optimizing extremely large web sites. In many instances, those sites will be multinational enterprise level corporations.

What do you do when you need to manage and optimize more than two million pages of dynamic content? How do you manage PPC ad campaigns in spaces with tens of thousands of keyword possibilities pointing at millions of potential landing pages? These are some of the areas our panelists will be addressing in this exciting session.

Moderator: Todd Friesen
Speakers:
Robert Carilli, Search Engine Marketing Director, Shop.com
Chris Boggs, Search Strategist, Avenue A ¦ Razorfish
Andrew Gerhart, VP of Search, Source Intelink Enthusiast Media
Aaron Shear, Director of SEO with Shopping.com, Shopping.com an eBay Company

From click to conversion, your user experience should be easy to track, measure and understand. However, the user's journey spans a very complex chain of sites, services, and technologies that are touched by that action. This session is about understanding the information and putting it in quality context that you can use. This panel also features frank talk from search engines and vendors at major web analytics services who have been invited to discuss their products.

Moderator: David Karandish
Speakers:
Paul Apodaca, Director, Program Management, Yahoo! Search Marketing
John Marshall, CTO, Founder, Market Motive
Jeff Gillis, Associate Manager, Google Analyti, Google

This session is going to look at getting the best bang for your code's buck.

We've come a very long way from the days of simply tweaking your links to remove the underline. CSS today is almost synonymous with Web 2.0. Panelists will discuss the cut corners, the non-underlined links, the freaky mouse-overs, and other code beautification techniques. HTML, on the other hand, has moved closer towards XML and feeds.

Our panelists will discuss how to update your code to match what is evolving on the web.

Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Marc Juneau, Founder, Nolagraphics.com
Ted Ulle, Senior Search Analyst, Converseon, Inc.
Daniel Goldman, Technical Evangelist, Opera Software

This session won't be your standard PowerPoint-based presentation. Our expert panelists in this session will take volunteer sites from the audience and review them - live - with an eye towards increasing your users' actions and conversion.

Moderator: Christine Churchill
Speakers:
Seth Wilde, Search Engine Marketing Manager, uShip
Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman, Didit.com
Lily Chiu, Senior Sales Engineer, Omniture
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services, Inc.
Brad Geddes, Founder, bgTheory.com

It is not often at PubCon that we step away from the constant stream of SEO and PPC information. However, Opera Software is a rare story on the web today. Opera is a dynamic, inspiring story of success against all odds.

Imagine waking up and finding that your two top competitors are the world's largest IT corporation (Microsoft) and the beloved favorite son of the web (Mozilla). Further imagine that both of those competitors give their products away (IE and Mozilla/FireFox). As scary a prospect as that is - it is the challenge that Opera Software has successfully faced.

Opera is both a commercial success in a category dominated by free products (browsers), and a social success on its own community site. Opera's main site (Opera.com), has a community section that is one of the best on the web today. The Opera Forums, blogs, and community pages are a world-class example of how to blend the commercial with the social community around a product.

Related Blog Entry:
http://www.pubcon.com/blog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1154161800

Moderator: Brett Tabke
Speakers:
Jon S. von Tetzchner, Chief Executive Officer, Opera Software