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February 28, 2008
Industrial Strength SEO
Mornings at SMX go so fast. Just a keynote and one session then it's off to lunch. In this case, the session is industrial strength SEO and so we've got some industrial strength speakers Martin Laetsch (Covario, Inc.), David Roth (Yahoo!, Inc.) and Marshall D. Simmonds (The New York Times). Don't worry, moderator Detlev Johnson (Search Return) is industrial strength too. He'll keep everything in order.
We're kicking things off with Martin Laetsch. The reality is that if you've got a small site, the basics are not that hard and you can optimize it pretty easily. But for a very large site or sites, with hundreds or millions of keywords, there just aren't enough hours in the day. How often do you do an audit of your site? Once a year? Twice? Monthly?
What you did yesterday for SEO isn't sufficient today. The algo is changing, your competitors are changing, your own site is changing.
You need well defined policy and procedures. Standards and best practices should be planned. Step one should be a detailed audit of your site. You should be looking for your weak points and problems. Are there template problems? Look for major issues. Get a baseline so that you know where you've been in addition to where you need to go. Look for coding traps, spiderability. Map your keywords to content pages. It's not enough to rank for A page. You want to rank for THE RIGHT page. Audit your site semi-monthly or monthly. You should be on top of any potential problems.
Define and Deploy your standards and Best Practices:
- Create consistent processes and written standards
- Provide comprehensive training to all key shareholders
- Create communication and collaboration protocols and expectations.
If you're working on a large site you MUST have a style guide. You need to be able to hand your style guide ot an experienced designer and have them know exactly what it means to do SEO in your organization.
Collect and share your best practices with the whole team.
Ensure continunous improvement. SEO doesn't stop. Do page level audits. Use tools and technology to keep up. On a very large site, you CAN NOT do it by hand. You need to use tools. Be able to pull out the points and say 'fix it'.
Searchers only give you three seconds to decide if you're the right choice for them. Make sure they're landing where they need to. You'll have to have analytics for this.
Define and Deploy a Tool Framework for Analytics Management Reporting
You need to prove that what you're doing is worthwhile and you have no way to do that unless you're measuring and reporting your progress. You need to report at least once a month. Make it macro level and tell them what it's doing right.
Monitor pages ranking for specific keywords
Create a monthly to do list of pages to be audited for optimization
Workflow management focusing on the highest value keywords and pages first.
David Roth is our next speaker. I've seen his presentation at Pubcon. It was pretty darn good but he's taken out all the Van Halen jokes. (so he says.) I encourage you to check out that link for more information on how big sites do their SEO.
Search is still the best way to get new customers. They use Lifetime Value to determine the value of optimization. They determine what a customer is worth across the life time of their conversion.
They just launched Yahoo! Buzz and the SEO team at Yahoo gets access to that as well as pairing with yahoo search on certain tools.
Yahoo is a very decentralized company. His team works on getting the training, education, best practices and standards implemented. The actual work is done elsewhere. (This goes back to making sure your standards and practices are exceptionally well-defined.)
[Commentary: Overall, I think people need to realize that big sites are going to be doing a lot of very basic SEO. They need to do it really really well and build it into the bones of the sites but at its heart, they rarely have the bandwidth or need to do the more high-level stuff.]
Measuring Success -- they use an SEO scorecard internally to track how successful they are. They built an index based on the same methodology as the predictive model and track it over time. They refine it as necessary. Dashboards are helpful for giving an at a glance view of where you are and how your doing against your self and your competitors over time.
If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.
The companies that do really well with SEO have it built into the culture. You need to get everyone to believe in it, believe in the value of it. That's really the ideal spot.
Marshall Simmonds is going to tell us about SEO at the NYT. Hee! Detlev called him MDS. We're going with that. Ooooh! MDS's team is responsible for removing the login for the NYT. I love you, MDS!
There's actually a lot more to this than just the NYT really. NYT has a huge number of sites that require SEO. And every site requires something different. There's no SEO out of the box solution. Everyone should be able to optimize a title tag and move the company name to the end, that's easy. But there's not SEO 101, then 202.
Oh my god, MDS, slow down! He mentions everything from SEO to Social Media to branding as concerns. Seriously. EVERYTHING.
For the NYT, they had some things they needed to do:
*Get the SEO Basics down
*Template optimization
*Pull down registration wall (PREACH IT!)
*Expose archives
*Monthly network-wide communication -- Tell people about successes. Build momentum and get buy in.
NYT's growth because of these small changes has been very good. He doesn't agree that you need to audit every month but you do have to do it regularly and you have to put checklists in front of people so that they understand their roles and their part in the process. Know what your IT department is doing. They're trying to be more efficient but it can screw up SEO as well. Make sure writers and content creators know SEO and can create for it.
He goes through several case studies for ToysRUs, TVGuide, Time Inc Interactive. I'll skip it because he's going really fast and it's not really relevant.
[Commentary: It's all well and good to say that you need to build company awareness but how about something concrete about HOW you do that?]
Find one person in each department that can be your evangelist. Make it their responsibility to build enthusiasm.
What to Avoid:
*Walling off content
*Under-communicating Success
*Not checking in with IT/Production/Design/Ad Sales
*Meta Keywords Tag -- automate it if you can. Just be done with it
*Implementing the changes-- know who is doing the actual optimization and talk to them the whole way through, not just the project managers but the actual people.
*Excessive expectations: timeframes, growth -- It takes a long time. Build in that expectation.
*Lack of editorial oversight: If you're automating the Title or Meta Description tag, stop.
For tracking, give information back but give it back in a way that makes sense to the level you're speaking to. Give a high level as well as the ability to dig down.
The search "life cycle" is always changing within a company. Your search/promotion strategy is going to be messed up. Plan for it. Lastly, tracking.
Aw, he finished with a picture of babies! Hi, babies!
Q&A
What are your suggestions for coming in after the site is built?
MDS: Identify the quick wins first, open up the site and start building into the DNA and training.
Martin: I agree with that completely. Auditing and reporting, getting things in front of the right people to get buy in. Use the carrot and the stick. Show them who is doing well and who need things done.
David: The only thing I would add is that most Web sites is that companies have IT/Web developers. You should be converting them
Detlev: Be the benevolent dictator and get them to buy in.
Good backlinks and terrible inter-linking. How do you fix it?
No one really seems to have a direct answer. David says site maps are good, they do a lot of internal linking as well. [I suggest siloing--we've got lots of articles on it, go check them out.]
[Much pushing of getting analytics. Do it. Do it now. I'm serious.]
Solutions mentioned:
Omniture
WebTrends
Organic search insight -- designed for big sites, extremely expensive
When you have millions of pages, do you go for flat or deep architecture?
[Have I mentioned our siloing series? It's really good.]
MDS: NYT site architecture is automated. They use Teragram(?).
Detlev: Think about how you want to distribute your linking in a pyramid.
MDS: We always say no more than three and if you say that to IT they'll throw things at you but it's not really necessary.
Martin: The engines WILL penalize you for deep directory structures. They look at how far down it is and they'll say this isn't important. Think about what's easier for users. Shallower is better.
Marshall, what are the top technical issues you face with wireframes and CSS, etc?
MDS: Excessive JavaScript. We had to do a triage. Where would we have the biggest effect? Movies got picked first. We've consolidated the templates.
Martin: The problem isn't technical it's that the agencies are designing things based on looks not on search. Flash is fantastic but you can't have an entire page in it. If you want Titles, they've got to be H1s, not an image.
Posted at February 28, 2008 12:03 PM
View related entries in: Design, SEO, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, smxwest2008
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