There is still time to sign up for the SMX West search engine marketing conference in California on March 2 to 4.

Danny Sullivan and Steve Ballmer

SMX is run by the highly knowledgeable search engine industry experts Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land fame.

This year’s scoop is the keynote speaker: CEO Steve Ballmer of Microsoft is going to speak about Bing and the search engine industry scene.

The question on everybody’s lips is, of course, whether Microsoft and Bing will manage to get enough traffic to threaten Google. The alliance with Yahoo! may give Ballmer what he wants.

The usefulness of networking

The main point of taking part in conferences like this one is the networking. We have said so before and we say it again: This is about getting contacts and new friends and about sharing work and business experiences.

There are a lot of search engine savvy people signing up for SMX. Most of them come from corporate management, IT, web design, marketing management in general and search engine marketing in particular. Given that the expo is about the search engine industry, you will also find researchers and librarians.

Among all these experts you will also find the speakers. There are sessions on all kinds of search engine related topics:

• Keyword research
• Real Time, Personalized & Social Search
• Local & Mobile Search
• Sponsors & Partners
• Social media
• Technical search engine optimization
• Paid search
• In house search engine marketing
• Analytics and conversion
• and more…

Santa Clara, California

A lot of companies have their own exhibits. Yes, you will probably get a free pen if you want, but do get the company representatives to talk. Some of the sales pitch will contain sound advice.

The expo takes place at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

Click here for more info on the SMX West search engine marketing conference

Search Engine Strategies in London

By the way, if you are in Europe you may want to take a look at the Search Engine Strategies conference in London from February 15 to 19.

Disclousure: Pandia and SMX are collaborating on reciprocal information dissemination.