Category Archives: in house seo

Observations on Trends on In-House SEO’s

Posted by on February 6, 2007 No comments

I have observed over the past year there seems to be a very strange split that is occurring within the in-house SEO group. Personally working in-house for a large company with a wide variety of SEO’s, I noticed that continual research and development is a dying art. Innovation is coming form old information and logic and little time is spent reading the boards/blogs and staying up to date.

Personally I spend half my day researching and staying up to date on any advancement as it could be catastrophic if you let it go. Additionally I noticed that the return to the forums only occurs when something goes wrong, the in-house folks who spend time reading and staying up to date are commonly not asking questions when changes are occurring since they are a step ahead.

How do you decide whether you need to submit a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools?

Posted by on January 17, 2007 No comments

From my experiments over the past year I have found a few interesting conclusions of the effectiveness of the Google Sitemap’s tool. Basically, there is only one reason I would use the Sitemaps feature, if your site has a lot of new content added every day that can possibly be 20-50 clicks deep on your site. These pages are very difficult for Google to pick up quickly, and with a site that is this deep it most likely has millions of pages.

Use this simple logic to determine if your pages belong in the sitemap, if you cannot click to the page from some sort of easy navigation, don’t bother submitting it. Orphaned content will not get ranked, unless it’s linked to by an outside source. If a user can’t click to it most likely they will not find it anyways, unless you run a search based site. Search based sites offer a huge nightmare to crawlers, at this point in time crawlers do not know how to search your site. Thus I would recommend using the keywords that you have in your search logs to create pages. Offer an easy way to get users to these predefined searches and ensure that the URL’s to these search results are clean and are not full of parameters.

From my tests I have submitted sitemaps with millions of pages that have been around for at least a few months, after my tests I could not measure an impact to these pages. Since they where so well indexed before.

What have your experiences been with Google Sitemaps?

Analyzing potential SEO problems on large sites

Posted by on January 8, 2007 No comments

When you are dealing with really large sites that get millions of visits, it can be a daunting task to see potential problems. The advent of Google’s Webmaster Tools has helped with identification of problems. However it’s not perfect, especially when you have millions of pages. Thus going back to basics can be the best way to check your logic.

If you are linux savvy, I would recommend grep’ing through you log files and start with the simple things. Here are a few examples of what you can look for.

more access_log | grep Googlebot | grep 302 > somenewfile this is a great way to see if you have any potential redirects that may be causing problems. 302’s are still notorious for causing issues.

You can also look for simple errors, like a 404

more access_log | grep Googlebot | grep 404 > somenewfile

I recently went through several sites and found an abundance of errors just by diligently looking at a small sample of logs. All you need is about 100meg’s or so, for a decent sample size.

Why do so many large scale sites want tracking links?

Posted by on January 4, 2007 No comments

Most average SEO’s know that tracking links are bad news, and most don’t have to deal with this issue. However the one thing that drives me out of my mind is the culture of adding tracking id’s when you link to someone else or just link to a page that you just created. I have never argued more about this subject in my entire life than this past year.

Here is how I have chosen to combat the situation internally. The first question I ask is what data are you looking to get from this? I ask this just to make them feel important, no matter what they say it’s not worth it. Secondly, I ask how often you are going to look back at this data. Of course they will say all the time, in reality they may look at the report once and then throw it out. In most cases they never look at the data.

Now ask the following, what’s worth more, data from no traffic or traffic and less data? Argument complete.

Unless you have a budget for spending on keywords with no ROI, where else is the traffic going to come from?

Re-invigorate the center of your business

Posted by on December 13, 2006 No comments

Andy Beal wrote this amazing article about 5 great steps to adding a Million dollars in revenue to your business next year. This article sparked a thought about focusing on the first thing you started with on your site. Most business’ make the mistake of adding new services, products and features without spending much time on the original spark that made your business what it is.

It could be as simple as changing the look and feel of this part, making the site a little more sticky by adding some cool toyish versions of the same thing. For example, what if you sold clothing on your site? Everyone has the same old category structure, where you can drill down to that pair of jeans you want in your size. What if you tried something old, a manikin of sorts but better yet a person wearing a certain style? Thus suggesting a whole package!

You could essentially still have the same old boring navigation, but at the same time you can invoke a sense of “cool” to your shopping experience. The Gap does a pretty good job of this and I really like their new site. The Gap is also a great site to see how you can screw up SEO at a whole new level. They really need help, and I remember seeing a job posting for an SEO, who did they hire?

Remember DHTML can always save you from your Ajax and Javascript nightmares! Think, Invent and make sure your design is accessible, a simple motto to live by.

How to sell SEO to upper management?

Posted by on October 2, 2006 No comments

Wow, what a tough idea to sell to upper management. How do you justify spending money on a gamble? This problem is very prevalent with any company that has a website.

The first thing out of any exec’s mouth, SEO is Black Magic and Voodoo. It’s like a role of the dice and why would we want to spend “X” to find out if we can make it too the top?

The funny thing about this, most of these same companies will buy advertising in news papers, TV ads and radio promotion which costs 10’s of thousands of dollars to produce. The concept of sending snail mail spam out, it doesn’t work!

Only companies that are willing to experiment wind up becoming huge! The ones that sit on their hands and watch the world turn have a very low growth rate; it’s mostly luck that drives a closed minded company forward.

Bottom line, don’t give up, keep selling the idea to the execs. SEO works; I have seen companies make millions of dollars from a tiny investment. Why would Google have a $400 price tag on its stock if they had no traffic to send?

Top 10 things to look for when hiring an internal SEO

Posted by on September 14, 2006 No comments

Deciding to hire an SEO firm or creating an internal department can be a tough decision. There are a lot of so called SEO Experts out in the field. Yesterday I listened to a pod cast from Shoe Money, http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/13/6-tips-to-having-a-successful-website/. I heard a caller on the show state that he has been doing SEO for 10-15 years. Inktomi, the first real search engine did not even start 15 years ago.

Here are a few tips for selecting talent for your own internal SEO department, I currently run an SEO department for a multi billion dollar a year firm.

1). Tame your HR department:

The common resume processing tools, used today by large companies, will destroy any real chance of finding a decent candidate. Make sure you see all resumes.

2). DO NOT combine SEO as a web designer/developer position:

Sorry web guys, but I have YET to meet one web designer that knows SEO. A talented web designer cannot do his or her own SEO, they will botch it up. I have seen 100’s of job postings for engineers and web designers who know SEO, this market is far too new to be doing this.

3). DO NOT combine an SEO and an SEM position together:

SEM is a full time job and will take a lot of time and concentration. Either your Free Traffic will suffer or you will become upside down on SEM spends.

4). SEO is a tactical position not a strategy position:

If you can only hire one person, make sure they are tactical, rather than a strategist. Strategists do not get things done they just talk about it. If you hire a strategist make sure they come after the Tactical leader and support the leader. This should also be done after you hire a link building position.

5). Forums:

Make sure your SEO person spends time on blogs and forums, possibly 50% of their time. Keep them on the leading edge. If they don’t know what’s going on you will suffer.

6). Backbone:

Make sure your SEO person has a backbone; do not hire someone that is not assertive. They need to be able to control your business and get things done. They also need to be able to train your engineers and fight for change to code. This is not a job for the quiet engineering types.

7). Social:

This fall directly in line with having a backbone, make sure you give them enough of a budget to attend SEO trade shows. Especially the Webmaster World Pubcon, your new SEO person will need to network like crazy. Without solid relationships with other webmasters, they will suffer.

8). HTML Knowledge:

Your SEO person will need to be able to understand HTML at a very detailed level, if they cannot quickly look at source code and determine issues. They will have a hard time moving the needle.

9). Out of the box:

This person will need to be able to think out of the box, especially if you have a very large website. Don’t be afraid to put money in to concepts that my not have a direct return on investment. SEO is not a spend a dollar and get a dollar fifty back concept. A good SEO plan consists of several concepts combined. I like to call it the soup pot strategy. If you only put the chick stock in the pot, and boil it, you will only get chicken stock back.

10). Psycho execs:

If you are a psycho executive, meaning you freak out every time a ranking moves one or 2 positions down. Do not hire an SEO, give up on the web and go back to pen and paper. You will cause your SEO person to kill themselves only to add a $1 to your bottom line. SEO takes time and is not something that you can ramp up in 2 days.