November 18th, 2009 by Richard Lee
Mega Site SEO – PubCon 2009
Do you have a large site with more than a million pages? If so, you should definitely attend this session. This panel will look at the special issues and challenges surrounding giant sites and discuss some of the greatest practices used by large companies to handle their mega site optimization.
Moderator: Joe Laratro
Speakers:
Matt Craine, VP of Online Media, Catalogs.com @mattcraine
Dan Perry, Director of SEO, Turner Broadcasting @danperry
Catfish Comstock, Senior Search Strategist, BusinessOnLine @SEOCatfish
Melanie Mitchell, SVP of Search Strategy, Digitas @melaniemitchell
Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optimization Architect, Microsoft @DerrickWheeler
Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell
Link building, content, on-site, technical
Understand Your Site Strategy
- What are your goals?
- Keyword research – specificity wins
- Create a spreadsheet
- Keywords
- Destination URL
- Avoid page competition
Keyword Research: Most Important Step
- Google Trends
- Adwords Tool
- SEO Book
- MS AdCenter
- Trendistic.com
- Quintara
Get Your Content Crawled and Improve Ranking
- Make sure every page has a link to it
- Clean URLs
- Avoid session IDs and mandatory cookies
- Allow meta content to be managed
- Semantic search
Boost Your Traffic / Ranking
- Organize site in an orderly hierarchy
- Improve page layout
- HTTP Status codes 200 301 302 404 500
- Internal linking
- Back-link Widget
- Make navigation and promotion contextual – Flash and JS are useful to promote unrelated content
Measure Your Performance (Analytics)
- Page views, unique/visits, search referrals
- Track pathing / recirculation
- Understand Keywords & Queries (ie. where are we winning & where are we not)
- Competitive Analysis
- SEO compliance
- Training
Rinse and Repeat (ongoing)
- Site Strategy
- Break out Assets (every content asset needs own page)
- Get content crawled
- Boost ranking
- Measure your performance
Dan Perry @danperry
The larger the company, the less SEO work you do (selling SEO in the company)
Where to Start
- Take stock in yourself
- Introvert vs. Extrovert
- Can you be an SEO evangelist
- Is that something you want to do? Can’t be an introvert.
Get in the Meetings
- People at all levels need to know you
- Importance to long-term business goals
- Feed off ego
Research the Competition
- Find strengths/weaknesses
- Pain points (the terms the company wants to rank)
- Show opportunities
What’s worked for me
- Departmental training (80% department data, 20% SEO data)
- Build it into the process
- SEO superstars (recognize and embrace)
- SEO Wiki (internal links to content give to people)
- Take Great Notes
SEO Analogies
- SEO is like Golf: be patient and think long term
- Making a Cake: more like flour rather than icing
- Baseball: requires a team effort
Take Aways:
- Take stock in yourself
- Details are everything
- Own it
Matt Craine @mattcraine
Creating Natural Linkbait
Examples:
- Who What Where When Why?.com (i.e. what do lizards eat)
- Let’s Talk Style (bring bloggers in)
- Content such as, “how to restore mustang”
Creative Linking
Interviews i.e. South Florida Business Journal then press release
Entice Sites & Visitors
Contests ie. Tools for Teaching Contest (essay from teachers on what they need) .edu teacher websites, etc. (then press release goes out)
Share with Transparency
- Using Website Optimizer with Google Anlytics – Case Study with Catalogs.com (PR 7 link back from Google’s blog plus thousands of other links)
- Saving $$$ by not relying on PPC or affiliates
- Over 90% of traffic from natural search for catalogs.com
Catfish Comstock @SEOCatfish
Site Wide Optimization Recommendations
- Most site wide issue due to complex, unfriendly CMS systems
- 302 redirects STILL cause problems (can be – big daddy updates
- 404 pages should be converted to 301 redirects
- Make global navigation or important content is not block by java script or flash (&strip=1 track in Google cache)
- Include rel=canonical on all pages
- Eliminate URL arch that allows for duplicate content
- Use Google Webmaster tools new parameters exclusion feature to acct for tracking URLs or duplicate URL paths
On Page Optimization Recommendations
- Create keyword map to track targets (targets versus keywords)
- Compare the KW map to your current ranking to note disparities
- Auto-populate lower level page titles based on reverse breadcrumb: Product -> Sub-Cat – Cat – Home
- Avoid auto-pop keyword pages, better to leave them blank unless you can ensure each is unique (title of page is relevant for internal linking)
- Include “long tail words” in your optimization whenever possible.
- Look for patterns in keyword data that you can exploit.
Off Page Optimization – Internal Linking Recommendations
- Check navigation template using FirstLinkChecker.com (only first link counts)
- Ensure your global navigation structure is KW focused (a link is a vote)
- Image based navigation (alt tag 4 to 7 words) can be very effective
- Have a usability professional review your information architecture
- Internally link blog content to relevant pages within the main content section of the site
- Internally link from blog content to main product and services pages
- Most recent and also most popular posts (links from other blog pages)
Off Page Optimization – External Linking Recommendations
- Evaluation all business partners for link opportunity
- Search for unlinked mentions and contact for potential links
- Your blog is a great link acquisition tool
- Leverage social media to promote blog
- 404 and 302 converted to 301
Data Analysis Optimization Recommendations
- Track micro-conversions and have a well defined conversion funnel
- Measure long tail success
- Check www.catfish.cc for Excel Example
- Separate Keywords into groups for conversion analysis: company | brand | general 1, etc.
- Integrate analytics with your CRM tools
- Tie acquisition cost to lifetime value of customer in order to justify larger Ad spend
- Leverage view through data to understand multi-click attribution: businessol.com/forms/view-through-gaining-insight-data
- How many conversions came from social media?
- Measure long tail success, download excel template example from: www.catfish.cc
Derrick Wheeler @DerrickWheeler
SEO is the process of influencing the Structure content and authority of a website to increase the number of rankings and improve the quality
The hardest part about SEO at Microsoft, was to get it implemented. After SEO recommendations, not enough budget to allocate for SEO implementation.
Microsoft.com is a collection of thousands of “websites” that share one domain name
- Microsoft has 1.2 Million URLs
- Each website impacts all of the other websites’ success
- Websites are managed individually
- Websites are published using various content management systems
- Legacy SEO Barrier Reduction
- Ongoing process utilizing FAST crawler technology
Top 5 Barriers:
- Duplicate and undesirable pages
- Excessive use of redirects (office.microsoft.com, fetch URLs)
- Improper error handling
- International URL Structure
- Low quality page titles and meta tags
Engage with “violators” to reduce barriers, enable work-arounds, implement Big/quick wins, and/or on-board to our Site-specific programs
Excel
- Organize in Excel
- URLs total, URLs crawled, total redirects, 404, 301, 302 200
Preventative
Include SEO at Level1. Standard Int’l URL structure for websites built and managed in CSP
SEO integration with CSP
- Include new SEO guidance into CSP developer guide
- Auto validation of SEO rules
- XML sitemap
Consistent URL structure
Site-Sec SEO Program Phrases
- Business outcomes and metrics
- Keyword research and selection
- Structural and technical audit
- Content editing for keyword intent
- Link building strategies and tactics
- Ongoing optimization
Measure Goals
A single source of data
SE -> Paid or Org -> KW Phrase -> Entry URL -> Visits -> Path of Pagview -> Success Events
Final Points
- Content is NOT king/queen in Mega SEO, it’s a prince/princess
- Develop an overall SEO approach based on how YOUR organization works
- Define business objective & metrics then implemting your measurement plan FIRST
- Choose your battles, don’t sweat the small stuff
- Let co-workers & partners be wrong sometimes
- Don’t be afraid to say NO to low-priority projects
- Teach others to Advocate for SEO in every meeting for every project that impacts any web page that links to, redirects to, or lives on your site