All Of Your Technical SEO Questions Answered And Bonus Free Developer Summit: Technical SMX East Dream Agenda

Search engine optimization involves a lot of moving parts. Audience analysis, content optimization, rankings factors — it can be hard to pinpoint concrete, actionable data. But technical SEO is a little different. It’s certainly not any easier than the other components, but at least the data can be a bit more straightforward. You can check your server logs to see if the search engine bots haven’t been crawling of your pages (or have been crawling lots of duplicate ones with various URLs); you can generally determine if search engines are having trouble extracting the content on your pages (ever see “loading, loading, loading” as a snippet?); and while the search engines don’t come right out and tell you when they’ve tweaked a ranking factor, they do generally announce technical changes (“we can crawl Flash“; “we are executing onClick JavaScript events“).

And technical SEO is clearly of vital importance. If search engines can’t crawl your pages and extract your content, your site will never be well-ranked for the queries you care about, even if you have the most awesome content on the web and more backlinks than the Adobe Reader download page.

Historically, search engines have had a tough time with newer web technologies. They were built as text-based engines that searched HTML pages, so it’s been taking them some time to catch up with things like Flash and AJAX and video. But the times, they are a changin’. The last couple of years have seen some great improvements, particularly from Google. The new parameter handling feature of Google webmaster tools to help with canonicalization issues due to URL parameters is only the latest example in a long line of advances in this area.

Get the latest solid information

Search Marketing Expo East, coming up in just a few weeks in New York, provides (among many other topics) in-depth, actionable information about how to construct search friendly web architecture, diagnose technical issues, and be prepared for the next evolution in search engine handling of web technologies. I’ve programmed a number of sessions that I’ll be moderating and speaking at, along with some fantastic technical experts, and have put together a suggested itinerary for the whole show for those interested in the more technical side of SEO.

Stay another day for even more technical discussions at Google NY

In addition, I’m organizing a post-SMX technical day of follow up discussion, information, and site review time to really dig into what technical issues you are experiencing and help you formulate real solutions. This developer summit, as we’re calling it, is co-hosted by Jane and Robot and Google and will be held at the Google New York office on Thursday, October 8th, the day after SMX East. It’s absolutely free and SMX attendees get preference on invitations.

See the SMX East developer’s itinerary for complete information about what’s available for web developers and anyone else interested in the technical side of SEO and see the Jane and Robot developer summit page for more details on the agenda and information on how to register for your invitation. The technical highlights of SMX East are included below. I hope to see you there!

Day 1 – October 5

SMX Boot Camp: For web developers who are new to search and SEO, we recommend that you go through ALL the SMX Boot Camp sessions on the first day to get a solid foundation of how search works. If you’re more experienced, then…

Duplicate Content Issues: The Search Engine Edition – What’s the best way to deal with duplicate content issues? In this session, search engine representatives offer direct advice including tips on the new canonical tag.

Ranking Tactics For Local Search – This session looks at cutting edge tactics that work to drive traffic from local listings, plus highlights research to predict where things may be going.

Maps, Maps, Maps! – This session looks at how the mapping & local seach services work from the three major search engines. Search representatives will share insights and tips for performing better.

Day 2 – October 6

Ecommerce Search Marketing Tactics – This session looks at a variety of tips and tactics to help retailers and ecommerce merchants do well in search results.

Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition – In this session, search engine engineers and representatives share their most important takeaways and tips for those hoping to do better in traffic, plus there’s lots of time devoted to open Q&A.

Ask The SEOs – PowerPoint Free! Put your questions about SEO to our panel of experts and get answers about ranking and crawling issues.

Universal & Blended Search Opportunities – This session looks at how to closely monitor your paid search visitors, analyze what they do when visiting your site and how best to convert them toward your goals.

Day 3 – October 7 – Technical SEO Track

Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues – Site isn’t being indexed fully? Experience a huge drop in rankings or traffic? This session provides a step by step checklist to help developers or others diagnose site issues and ensure they’re following best technical practices in SEO.

Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz – Subdomains or subdirectories? Are tracking parameters a problem for search engines? Keywords in the URL make a difference? How about the “level” of a page – is “deep” in a site bad? This session focuses on technical SEO questions of this nature and provides answers.

Pumping Up WordPress For SEO – WordPress is an incredibly popular blogging platform and CMS system. This session shows you how to quickly tune WordPress with plugins and settings to get the most out of technical SEO.

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO – This session looks CSS, AJAX and Web 2.0 dynamic design techniques that can cause search engine indexing and ranking issues, with solutions to consider.

Register for SMX East and request your Jane and Robot Developer Summit invite!