Welcome!

Technical site architecture is crucial to search success. Start the day with an overview of the most important components, with examples that might make you laugh and cry at the same time.

Why it is Hard to Crawl Your Website (and how to fix it!)

For the past 18 months, I’ve been leading the engineering effort for LinkScape, to crawl the entire web and use the data to analyze linking patterns between website. And while building a crawler is relatively easy, getting good data crawling the internet is still very hard because of a range of technical issues found in most websites.

I’ll share a “Top 10″ list of the best practices you can follow to make it easier for a search engine to crawl your website, and share some real data and examples of companies getting it right, and also getting it very, very wrong.

Using the Google APIs

You may have seen the Search Engine Land article in which Vanessa suggested that Google search and Google code have coffee. And now they are! Here about how you can use Google APIs in your web applications without having problems with Google search.

Inside the Construction of a Google Search Result (SERP)

How does Google pull together the title and description for each page in the search results? What about sitelinks (both the traditional vertical ones and the newer horizontal ones) and links within the description itself? How are they using RDFa and other structured data to construct rich snippets that provide even more data. And what about universal search, which pulls in video, images, blog posts, and other non-web page data into the search results? Get all your questions answered from Googlers who work on these components.

Beyond Text: Rich Content, Structured Data and Multimedia

AJAX, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, Flex, RDFa, video, images… The web has moved beyond HTML text and while the search engines are evolving to keep up, there’s a lot web developers can do to maximize the searchability of their rich content.

Tools and Techniques

Get a rundown of all the free tools available from the search engines and elsewhere that can help you build a better site and diagnose issues.

Site Review and Q&A

Get your site reviewed by search experts! To nominate your site, tweet @janeandrobot before the conference. We’ll be choosing several sites from twitter to review.

Microsoft Stack: ASP.Net MVC, IIS, Silverlight

Discuss the customizations that can make a huge impact on searchability, such as search-friendly URL rewriting, building custom error pages, solving ViewState issues, and why you shouldn’t use default redirects in IIS 5.0 and 6.0.

Ask a Google Engineer

Have questions about your captions, or site links on the Google SERP? Just want to know what it’s like on ‘the inside’? Stop by and ask all your questions!

Site Review Clinic

One on one help with any specific issues you may be having. Each session limited to 15 minutes.

Bing.com – SEO for a Decision Engine

Have you heard about the decision engine from Microsoft yet? Wondering how this changes SEO? Stop by to learn about how new search features like Categorized Search, Hover Preview and Super Best Matches will impact your site. Also, I will be demoing the Bing Webmaster Center and the Bing Search API.