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MozCon 2019: The Initial Agenda

Posted by cheryldraper

We’ve got three months and some change before MozCon 2019 splashes onto the scene (can you believe it?!) Today, we’re excited to give you a sneak preview of the first batch of 19 incredible speakers to take the stage this year.

With a healthy mix of fresh faces joining us for the first time and fan favorites making a return appearance, our speaker lineup this year is bound to make waves. While a few details are still being pulled together, topics range from technical SEO, content marketing, and local search to link building, machine learning, and way more — all with an emphasis on practitioners sharing tactical advice and real-world stories of how they’ve moved the needle (and how you can, too.)

Still need to snag your ticket for this sea of actionable talks? We've got you covered:

The Speakers

Take a gander at who you'll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we've already worked out:

Sarah Bird

CEO — Moz

Welcome to MozCon 2019 + the State of the Industry

Our vivacious CEO will be kicking things off early on the first day of MozCon with a warm welcome, laying out all the pertinent details of the conference, and getting us in the right mindset for three days of learning with a dive into the State of the Industry.

Casie Gillette

Senior Director, Digital Marketing — KoMarketing

Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember

We know that only 20% of people remember what they read, but 80% remember what they saw. How do you create something people actually remember? You have to think beyond words and consider factors like images, colors, movement, location, and more. In this talk, Casie will dissect what brands are currently doing to capture attention and how everyone, regardless of budget or resources, can create the kind of content their audience will actually remember.

Ruth Burr Reedy

Director of Strategy — UpBuild

Human > Machine > Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals and Their Machine-Readable Equivalents

The push and pull of making decisions for searchers versus search engines is an ever-present SEO conundrum. How do you tackle industry changes through the lens of whether something is good for humans or for machines? Ruth will take us through human-readable quality signals and their machine-readable equivalents and how to make SEO decisions accordingly, as well as how to communicate change to clients and bosses.

Wil Reynolds

Founder & Director of Digital Strategy — Seer Interactive

Topic: TBD

A perennial favorite on the MozCon stage, we’re excited to share more details about Wil’s 2019 talk as soon as we can!

Dana DiTomaso

President & Partner — Kick Point

Improved Reporting & Analytics within Google Tools

Covering the intersections between some of our favorite free tools — Google Data Studio, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager— Dana will be deep-diving into how to improve your reporting and analytics, even providing downloadable Data Studio templates along the way.

Paul Shapiro

Senior Partner, Head of SEO — Catalyst, a GroupM and WPP Agency

Redefining Technical SEO

It’s time to throw the traditional definition of technical SEO out the window. Why? Because technical SEO is much, much bigger than just crawling, indexing, and rendering. Technical SEO is applicable to all areas of SEO, including content development and other creative functions. In this session, you’ll learn how to integrate technical SEO into all aspects of your SEO program.

Shannon McGuirk

Head of PR & Content — Aira Digital

How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom

Everyone who’s ever tried their hand at link building knows how much effort it demands. If only there was a way to keep a steady stream of quality links coming in the door for clients, right? In this talk, Shannon will share how to set up a "digital PR newsroom" in-house or agency-side that supports and grows your link building efforts. Get your note-taking hand ready, because she’s going to outline her process and provide a replicable tutorial for how to make it happen.

Russ Jones

Marketing Scientist — Moz

Topic: TBD

Russ is planning to wow us with a talk he’s been waiting years to give — we’re still hashing out the details and can’t wait to share what you can expect!

Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist — Moz

How Many Words is a Question Worth?

Traditional keyword research is poorly suited to Google's quest for answers. One question might represent thousands of keyword variants, so how do we find the best questions, craft content around them, and evaluate success? Dr. Pete dives into three case studies to answer these questions.

Cindy Krum

CEO — MobileMoxie

Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future

Before you ask: no, this isn’t Fraggle Rock, MozCon edition! Cindy will cover the myriad ways mobile-first indexing is changing the SERPs, including progressive web apps, entity-first indexing, and how "fraggles" are indexed in the Knowledge Graph and what it all means for the future of mobile SERPs.

Ross Simmonds

Digital Strategist — Foundation Marketing

Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing

Many marketers focus solely on keyword research when crafting their content, but it just isn't enough these days if you want to gain a competitive edge. Ross will share a framework for uncovering content ideas leveraged from forums, communities, niche sites, good old-fashioned SERP analysis, and more, tools and techniques to help along the way, and exclusive research surrounding the data that backs this up.

Britney Muller

Senior SEO Scientist — Moz

Topic: TBD

Last year, Britney rocked our socks off with her presentation on machine learning and SEO. We’re still ironing out the specifics of her 2019 talk, but suffice to say it might be smart to double-up on socks.

Mary Bowling

Co-Founder — Ignitor Digital

Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search

Get ready for a healthy dose of all things local with this talk! Mary will deep-dive into how the Google Local algorithm has matured in 2019 and how marketers need to mature with it; how the major elements of the algo (relevance, prominence, and proximity) influence local rankings and how they affect each other; how local results are query dependent; how to feed business info into the Knowledge Graph; and how brand is now "king" in Local Search.

Darren Shaw

Founder — Whitespark

From Zero to Local Ranking Hero

From zero web presence to ranking hyper-locally, Darren will take us along on the 8-month-long journey of a business growing its digital footprint and analyzing what worked (and didn’t) along the way. How well will they rank from a GMB listing alone? What about when citations were added, and later indexed? Did having a keyword in the business name help or harm, and what changes when they earn a few good links? Buckle up for this wild ride as we discover exactly what impact different strategies have on local rankings.

Andy Crestodina

Co-Founder / Chief Marketing Officer — Orbit Media

What’s the Most Effective Content Strategy?

There’s so much advice out there on how to craft a content strategy that it can feel scattered and overwhelming. In his talk, Andy will cover exactly which tactics are the most effective and pull together a cohesive story on just what details make for an effective and truly great content strategy.

Luke Carthy

Digital Lead — Excel Networking

Killer CRO and UX Wins Using an SEO Crawler

CRO, UX, and an SEO crawler? You read that right! Luke will share actionable tips on how to identify revenue wins and impactful low-hanging fruit to increase conversions and improve UX with the help of a site crawler typically used for SEO, as well as a generous helping of data points from case studies and real-world examples.

Joy Hawkins

Owner — Sterling Sky Inc.

Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don't Impact Organic

Google’s local algorithm is a horse of a different color when compared with the organic algo most SEOs are familiar with. Joy will share results from a SterlingSky study on how proximity varies greatly when comparing local and organic results, how reviews impact ranking (complete with data points from testing), how spam is running wild (and how it negatively impacts real businesses), and more.

Heather Physioc

Group Director of Discoverability — VMLY&R

Mastering Branded Search

Doing branded search right is complicated. “Branded search” isn't just when people search for your client’s brand name — instead, think brand, category, people, conversation around the brand, PR narrative, brand entities/assets, and so on. Heather will bring the unique twists and perspectives that come from her enterprise and agency experience working on some of the biggest brands in the world, providing different avenues to go down when it comes to keyword research and optimization.

See you at MozCon?

We hope you’re as jazzed as we are for July 15th–17th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, we’ve got your back:

Grab your MozCon ticket now!

Has speaking at MozCon been on your SEO conference bucket list? If so, stay tuned — we’ll be starting our community speaker pitch process soon, so keep an eye on the blog in the coming weeks!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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#22: Rob Allerman, of PRT, on energy forecasting

Rob Allerman, the senior director of power analytics at Pattern Recognition Technologies, joins the show to discuss the importance of energy forecasting for producers and the challenges renewable energy sources create for forecasters.

Links: • More about Pattern Recognition Technologies.

• More from IER on challenges created by renewables.

The post #22: Rob Allerman, of PRT, on energy forecasting appeared first on IER.

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2019 lab sessions starting soon: Check out new additions to the SEI campus!

Paonia, Colorado is home to Solar Energy International (SEI)’s industry leading solar energy technical training facility. Since the early 2000s, tens of thousands of students have received hands-on experience in installing and commissioning solar systems at our lab yard. SEI offers classes on a variety of critical topics for industry professionals from grid-tied, to battery-based, and more advanced O&M classes. We’re constantly updating our lab yard with the best the industry has to offer to give our students relevant experience on what they will–or are already encountering in the solar industry.

Here are some exciting additions students will experience in the lab yard this year.

New Grid-tied Carport System to Explore:

PV201L: Solar Training- Solar Electric Lab Week (Grid-Direct) will feature a new station! Thanks to Panasonic’s donation of a pallet of 40 HIT modules installed on a Schletter carport, students will now be able to get their hands on the installation and commissioning of this new carport station.

AC-coupled SMA Sunny Island System:

In 2018 we expanded our battery-based systems in our PV301L: Solar Training- Solar Electric Lab Week (Battery-Based) training by adding a donated BluePlanet lithium ion battery bank to our newly installed Sunny Island system. We also made our Magnum battery-based system compliant with NEC 2017 Rapid Shutdown standards.

Top-Notch Accommodations:

Our BRAND NEW Student Lounge features ethically-sourced (including lots of beetle kill pine) timber-framing. This is the next phase of our Paonia, Colorado campus development and will provide a gathering spot, kitchen, and new bathrooms for students.

Check out our lab-based classes coming up at our headquarters in Paonia, Colorado this spring, summer and fall:

PV201L: Solar Training – Solar Electric Lab Week (Grid-Direct)

Put classroom theory into practice with the ultimate hands-on PV experience available! This five-day lab class offers students the opportunity to work closely with experienced PV professionals and get their hands dirty by fully installing and commissioning a wide variety of system types before testing the system, then de-commissioning and breaking down. You will work with modules, inverters, and racking components from a wide range of manufacturers that are all big players in the PV industry. A low student-to-instructor ratio and the world-class lab facility at SEI’s lab facilities in Paonia, Colorado or Costa Rica combine to make PV201L the perfect environment for your first hands-on PV experience.

PV301L: Solar Training – Solar Electric Lab Week (Battery-Based)

This five-day lab class is an amazing opportunity to get hands-on experience with a wide range of battery-based PV system components and architectures at SEI’s world-class lab facility in Paonia, Colorado. Working in small groups with instructors who live and breathe battery-based PV, students install, test, and commission numerous PV systems with energy storage that address a wide range of applications. The labs in PV301L consist of stand-alone and multimode PV systems, and include AC and DC coupled equipment. Many experienced solar professionals have never worked with batteries – this is your chance to leap to the front of the pack!

PV351L: Solar Training – PV Systems – Tools and Techniques for Operations and Maintenance Lab Week (Grid-Direct)

PV351L is an intensive, advanced training designed for solar professionals already working in the PV industry who want to take their technical skills to the next level and gain hands-on experience with a wide range of advanced analytical tools and meters. Through a mix of classroom and lab time, theory is immediately applied in the field, with a focus on commissioning, operations and maintenance, troubleshooting, and performance evaluation. Students gain experience using a wide variety of the latest and greatest tools the industry has to offer, including various multimeters, insulation resistance testers, IV curve tracers, and infrared cameras. Learn the advanced skills required to ensure PV systems operate safely and reliably!

The post 2019 lab sessions starting soon: Check out new additions to the SEI campus! appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

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Wind and Solar Tax Credits

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The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

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The Mirage of a “Rational Green Deal” Comment on Holman Jenkins Jr.

There are few editorialists that many of us enjoy more than Holman W. Jenkins Jr. His twice-weekly “Business World” columns in the Wall Street Journal speak truth to power, including on the top-tier issue of energy and climate.

His March 16, 2019, piece, Is There a Green Rational Deal?, presents a government-activist alternative to the Green New Deal’s “fantastically expensive plan to fix precisely nothing.” But Jenkins errs in reaching for a silver bullet where, indeed, the fix is unnecessary, speculative, expensive, and not doable. And he defaults on the clear policy winner: free-market, wealth-is-health adaptation.

A New Proposal

Assuming model-driven, high-warming scenarios, Jenkins offers a multi-part government program to mitigate emissions and reverse manmade global warming.

Jenkins’s out-of-the-box proposal is a geoengineering fix whereby particles are injected in the air to reduce the sunlight reaching the earth, estimated to cost billions of dollars annually.

The second part of his “saner, no-regrets approach” to the Green New Deal (GND) starts with greater battery research (to help renewables overcome intermittency) and ending “irrational obstacles to nuclear power.” But the main intervention is a carbon tax. In Jenkins’s words:

Adopt a carbon tax as a pro-growth tax reform and hope the example catches on. Even if it doesn’t, any low-carbon energy technologies that emerge, if they are efficient and competitive, would be adopted by other countries.

Jenkins is proposing, in effect, GND Light with a geoengineering twist. While arguably better than what is on the table from the Progressive Left, his alternative suffers from a raft of problems that make it a clear loser to the real alternative of less government and market adaptation.

Climate Science

The wide range of predicted anthropogenic warming is proof enough that the alleged problem is ill-defined and speculative. There are distinct positives from increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and climate economists such as Robert Mendelsohn have calculated net benefits from the human influence at the lower end of the climate-model-driven IPCC range. The CO2 fertilization effect, and the benefits of moderate warming (natural or manmade), are behind this assessment.

Jenkins should not take high-range warming at face value given the out-the-window evidence of global lukewarming. He should also be aware of the logarithmic (not linear) forcing from greenhouse gas concentrations, meaning that the warming effect grows ever less with additions of CO2.

Jenkins should also examine the statistics of extreme weather events to see whether it indicates worsening climate change—or is just the bad luck of weather. A recent study of the peer-reviewed literature on hurricanes, for example, found little change in frequency and intensity, although warming can be expected to increase associated precipitation and storm surge. The data on droughts and floods are ambiguous too.

Public Policy

Each of Jenkins’s substitute policies for the GND are problematic in their own right.

First, geoengineering is untried and very controversial on both sides of the climate debate. “Playing God with climate” not only applies to anthropogenic warming but also anthropogenic cooling. Certain areas would be helped and others hurt within any aggregate temperature shift.

Second, making nuclear or batteries competitive has proven to be a mirage after much entrepreneurial (and governmental) effort. And presumably, a carbon tax is preferred to such micro-government policies aiming to reduce demand or lower the carbon intensity of supply.

Third, the carbon tax—along with its necessary equity adjustments and international trade barriers—is an intellectual loser and political unsalable.

Overall, Jenkins makes the common mistake of assuming market failure but neglecting analytic failure and government failure. Even assuming clear net societal costs from the anthropogenic warming, optimal public policy must avoid both over and under correction. Yet with uncertain science and debated economic impacts, perfect-knowledge solutions cannot come from even a well-intentioned intelligentsia.

Then comes politics. Can U.S. lawmakers do the “right” thing out of the gate, much less over time? And what about the other 190 political jurisdictions around the world? The failure of the Kyoto Protocol and the listing Paris climate accord makes any U.S.-side strategy ineffectual. (The U.S. accounts for only 15 percent of global emissions.)

Free Market, Anyone?

The Green New Deal and Green New Deal Light are solutions looking for problems and certainly worse than the alleged disease. In place of a non-solution for an undefined problem, the best policy is reduced, not increased, government intervention in the U.S. economy.

The market alternative is a first-do-no-harm policy, what I have elsewhere described as a “no regrets” policy. And being a wealth creator, free markets are a self-help, adaptation creator.

Self-interested business practices will help determine whether the foe is weather or climate. Either way, there is clear evidence that adaptation is well underway given the extreme weather events to date. Seen another way, the costs of extreme weather are being internalized.

For example, the family-owned McIlhenny Company has built a $5 million, 20-foot levee around its Tabasco plant on Avery Island off the Louisiana coast to insure against flooding. The man-made barrier also helps preserve the island’s natural defense, the marsh. “For my family, it’s very important that Avery Island is here and we do a lot of work to protect it,” stated the great-great grandson of the company founder.

Conclusion

Climate change policy should not be a road to serfdom, with each government intervention leading to more intervention, reducing societal wealth and narrowing personal freedom. Intervention turns into central planning and authoritarianism where, as F. A. Hayek warned, the worst get on top.

The advantage of the free market is that analytic failure (central planning by an intellectual elite) and government failure (gaming by a political elite) are avoided. The incredible bread machine allows individuals and organizations to plan and protect against the vicissitudes of weather or climate.

The post The Mirage of a “Rational Green Deal” Comment on Holman Jenkins Jr. appeared first on IER.

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