You have also most likely seen articles about how social media can be used to develop relationships that drive links to quality content on your site. This is all SEO goodness.

Sadly, too often social media is siloed in the enterprise. What happens is someone in the executive team recognizes that there is potential value in social media and launches a project to implement it without being properly informed about the ways that social media can impact the business.

Then, one of two things happen:

1. It becomes a checkbox. Someone was assigned to it, so now it is “handled”. Unfortunately, this is social media cast adrift. Teams of people working away without direction will almost always drift towards generating the highest possible level of activity they can with minimal effort. However, activity and business results are rarely closely connected.
2. It gets treated like broadcast media. Traditional marketing people are comfortable with broadcast media, and they understand how spend in that type of media brings returns, so they assume that social media is the same way. The result here is potentally useful for brand building, but it is not clear that the most important business goals of the company are advanced.

Let’s illustrate this with two real world situations I have seen, though I need to keep the company names anonymous.

The Checkbox

Company A is a Fortune 1000 company that knows it wants to play in social media. They are a B2B brand, and they know they want to have a social media strategy, but they don’t have the resources in-house to execute it.

The head of the PR group is tasked with taking the challenge on. She is brilliant at what she does, but her plate is way to full so she can’t spend many cycles on understanding how to set the strategy.

She hires an outside social media agency to come in and take care of the strategy. The charismatic social media executive comes in and outlines a great looking strategy. The PR director does not know the right questions to ask about how this strategy will feed the business, so the strategy is approved, and the agency goes off and does their thing.

The agency does a great job and focuses on building a large audience of friends/followers. Along the way, they recognize that content closely related to the B2B brands products is not too sexy. In order to build up the audience, the topics drift steadily into a consumer focused areas.

The audience grows nicely, and they are even able to build up a good audience. But, their customers are not in it. No influence is built with their customer base, and the social media activity that takes place is not really about topics that relate in any direct way to their products.

The Result: They got to check the checkbox, but the business was not aided by the social media efforts.

A Better Approach: Don’t focus on audience size here. Consider focusing this social media strategy on curating great content related to your market space. You don’t want to be commercial and talk a lot about your products, but you can talk about the types of problems that people face that relate to your products. Curate great content from others. Use this to build relationships with industry peers and media that covers your market. For this business, building those relationships through frequent communication with influencers can be a great extension to your PR strategy.

In addition, if you are like Company A, you may have products with long sales cycles. Constant exposure to other influencers, and active online interaction with them establishes you as a leader in the space.

Your potential customers are probably checking many places to learn about potential suppliers, so the chances they will learn about you when they are doing their research is greatly enhanced. This is great from a tradaitional marketing perspective.

From an SEO perspective, those online interactions will result in brand mentions and links from highly authoritative sites and authors. That’s as good as it gets!

Broadcast Media In A Multi-Brand Enterprise

Company B is a large enterprise with more than 10 brands with a B2C focus. The executive team has a traditional marketing background, so the social media team is put into the corporate marketing department. They put together a team which includes an outside agency and in-house resources as well.

The execution is great. The content they create is closely tied to the overall theme of the brand and large audiences are built. Their is heavy interaction, and there is a lot of value to the brand overall. The model is designed to operate like TV and print, but with the added bonus of interaction, which is truly a great thing.

The problem is that brand managers for several of the product lines want to participate. They have their own niche target audiences, each of which has their own unique needs.

However, the corporate marketing department feels like it is serving a larger goal. From time to time, they will put out updates/tweets specific to each brand, but those communications are lost on the larger stream of communications for the overall brand. No consistency is possible for each individual brand, and they can’t build their own audiences.

The Result: The needs of the larger brand were served, but not of the individual brands, who get little direct benefit.

A Better Approach: Having the corporate marketing department have a social media group is a great idea. That is not at all a problem, but, it also makes sense to let the larger brands in the company portfolio have their own social media efforts that piggyback on the coporate efforts. This may be their own Google+/Facebook/Twitter accounts. They should coordinate with the corporate social media team, and can still get leverage from them. This will allow them to build audience specific to the individual brands.

From an SEO perspective, this lets the individual brands build social media accounts focused in their specific audiences and needs. This can now drive links, mentions, shares, and tweets that focus specifically on that brand.

Measurement

Last but not least, don’t forget the role of measuring results. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Devise strategies for measuring the results you get.

This is a complex topic all by itself, and beyond the scope of this article, but there are many different tools for measurement. For example, our agency has an account with bit.ly that provides some great data:

This data is a great way to see what content is working for you, and what is not. There are many other great tools as well. Google Analytics lists a large number of quality tools on this page. Google Analytics has also added reports that seek to capture the value of social media as well.

The key thing is to make sure that measurement is a key part of your overall strategy.

Summary

These are both scenarios where enterprise organizations silo their social media. In the checkbox scenario, little direction is given and the work focuses on activity. In the broadcast media scenario, the focus is too narrow and a lot of the potential benefit is ignored.

The most important thing you can do is to step back and get an understanding of what the potential benefits could be for your business. Then, armed with that knowledge, decide which areas you want to focus on. Only then can you decide where it should sit in the organization, who should own the process, and what the priorities are for your social media efforts.

• Won’t require intra-office diplomacy worth of Kissinger.
• Requires only a single configuration or code change.
• Will result in big gains for almost every page of my website.

Here are my favorites:

Server Compression

Before you do anything else, make sure your server is using HTTP compression. With this type of compression, your server compacts files using the lossless GZIP algorithm. That can reduce transfer sizes by 50% or more. Then, your Web browser decompresses the files upon arrival.

That speeds page load times and, since GoogleBot supports GZIP, speeds crawl times, too. That’s all good for crawl efficiency. Plus, a faster-loading site means fewer bounces, another SEO win.

Note: You should always test HTTP compression, thoroughly, before you deploy it. I’ve used it on 200 or so sites now, and have had it cause weird bugs twice. A error rate of 1% isn’t terrible, but it’s definitely something you want to check.

There are lots of ways to check your server’s compression settings. I like to use Google PageSpeed. It’ll give you a warning if you’re not using HTTP compression.

You can also just use a CURL command, like this:

curl –header ‘accept-encoding: gzip’ -I www.mysite.com

Replace mysite with yours, and then check the result for ‘Content-encoding: gzip’:

GZIP's on: Woo hoo!

If you aren’t running server-side compression, get it set up. It’s a great, site-wide performance booster.

Response Codes

I won’t belabor this one—I wrote about server response codes and SEO a few months ago. Just make sure your server is delivering the right response when things go right or wrong. If it isn’t, fixing response codes is another great site-wide win.

Put The Brand Last

Title tag 101 here, folks: If you’ve got a strong brand for which you know you’ll rank #1, change your title tag template to put that brand name last.

They may deny it, but search engines definitely give more weight to phrases that come first in the title tag. Every time Google insists that’s not the case, I go back and test it, and every time the results are the same. Put your key phrase first and you rank better.

Most enterprise sites use a content management system. Edit the default title tag in one place, and you re-order the title tags throughout the site. Another easy win.

Remove Fat Javascripts

If you’ve got a 60+ line embedded javascript on every page of your site, put it in a .js file instead. Then include it using a script statement:

A good javascript include. Not surprising: It's SearchEngineLand's page source.

That may not seem like much. If you clean up 2-3 instances of embedded javascript, site-wide, you’re only removing 180 lines of code, right?

Well, yeah. But 50-60 lines of code means about 4kb. Remove three of those and you’ve reduced page transfer size by 12kb. That’s a solid performance upgrade.

By the way, you can do the same thing with embedded CSS.

Set Up Site Verification

OK, this isn’t a quick SEO win, exactly, but it’ll set you up for the next round. Get verification set up for Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. You’ll get great, direct feedback from each search engine about stuff to fix.

Take off the tin foil hat, first: There’s nothing the search engines learn from site verification that they don’t already know. Verification is there to make sure other people can’t get at that data. By verifying, you get access to crawl results for your own site. Do it.

Lazy Wins, FTW!!

I’m a lazy guy. I like making one change and watching the traffic roll in. If you’ve got other lazy wins, leave ‘em below!

“Brands are the solution, not the problem.  Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” 

- Eric Schmidt, Former Google CEO and current Chairman of the Board, Google.

For the last five years or so, the role of Director of Search and other prominent Enterprise SEO titles within big brands was the easiest way in the world to collect an outsized paycheck. You didn’t even need a college education.

As such, relatively junior SEO’s with very little context were at the helms of some surprisingly large enterprises. We have seen big brand SEO leads whose previous job titles were “Starbucks Barrista” and “Paintball Referee”.

With the “Too Big To Fail SEO Era” behind us in addition to Panda Updates and Search Quality Improvements flying out of Mountain View fast and furiously, there has never been a more treacherous time to be sitting atop the enterprise value of a large company’s search assets.

When It All Goes Wrong

When you are the owner/webmaster of JohnnysFruitStand.com and you lose fifty-percent of your search traffic, it will hurt. You may even have to close your business, as so many did after the first wave of Panda assessments began rolling out in February 2011.

It is painful to rely so heavily on Google for your livelihood and no one should diminish the pain and suffering of those sole proprietors and small businesses that took it on the chin as “collateral damage” to Panda.

When you are deeply rooted in the managerial Org Chart of a major enterprise and one of your SEO theses is off or an algorithmic update catches you with your pants down, not only are you going to probably lose your job, but the repercussions are systemic. A fifty-percent loss in search traffic could mean hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue lost, layoffs in your business, and maybe even layoffs upstream through your supply chain.

As we have seen more and more lately, the latter is happening at a higher frequency. Often we are brought in to assess the damage and deliver a way out. Other times we are brought in to assess the business by the financial institution that could give everyone (well, everyone but the guy/team who was asleep at the wheel) a lifeline.

However, the one painful trend we see emerging is that much of this damage is brought on by the hubris of the big brand in-house SEO team that thought they were untouchable.

Getting Back On Track

“Everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth.”

- Mike Tyson, former Undisputed Heavyweight Champion Of The World

The absolute worst thing you can do as a major contributor to user, customer, or audience acquisition is to be caught off-guard.

Your multi-billion dollar brand might organically shake out a hundred high-quality links, a thousand global influencer shares, and a hundred thousand branded search terms a day, but that is not an excuse to spend your day planning your family vacation.

If anything, you should be using that time to prepare the contingency plans for the day that Google punches you in the mouth.

As we all know from Fight Club, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

How Defensible Is Your Search Traffic

As people have heard me say for almost a decade now, search engines are the scoreboard of the Internet. I have never heard of a class killing, 800lb gorilla, community-beloved website or product that has not ranked atop or near the top of their search market place over a meaningful period of time.

From time to time, Google will leave one or two stranded as they are not infallible, but they always catch up to the relevant trend.

To understand how that scoreboard is compiled, you …as the SEO wunderkind…have had to learn about every signal source on the web that the engines consider. You have had to learn social media, public relations, content creation, web analytics, conversion rate optimization, web design, user experience, etc….all in the name of groking how Google orders its index.

Have you ever let one of these facets stray out of the bounds of search engine best practices without forcing a business decision to be made in the process? If you have, Mike Tyson wants to talk to you.

Education Is Fundamental

For many big brand SEO’s, a good defense is the offense and that is a perfectly valid strategy. At some point, no amount of you tinkering with the site architecture or training product managers and editorial staff is going to substantively lift the site’s traffic profile. You are doing all those things so nothing they do substantively tanks the site’s traffic profile.

Institutional knowledge is a huge component of defensibility, as is the communication of risk factors. If everyone wakes up one day and the business got thrashed by Panda because you slept on the risk awareness of a huge content migration, feature roll-out, link-building campaign, you have not earned your paycheck.

If you outlined the risk and a business decision was made to move ahead, you did your job. At that juncture, your job is to move forward and help unwind the risk so that the business can return to a position of defense. It will be painful for everyone, but it will not be a surprise. The worst thing in the world to a major enterprise is an unfortunate surprise.

Tell The Truth

This is not time to cover your rear. The best way to cover your rear is never to put the business in a bad position due to lack of preparation. The truth is an absolute defense.

Be accountable for your actions and complicity. You will not be able to lead anyone anywhere if they can’t trust you. Too often, we see SEO’s fabricate some new algorithm that was coincidentally overweighted to all the things they dropped the ball on.

Generally, people think search engines are voodoo. De-mystify Search and articulate where things broke or could break. Similarly, those who can best articulate the relatively simple concepts of Enterprise SEO often get the most buy-in.

Aim At Your 15m Target

If the business is hit hard by a search algorithm update, due to the nature of search, everyone will have a theory about what happened and how to emerge.  Do not get lost in chaos. Take inventory of the moving parts and start executing on things you know will improve the state of affairs.

Big business cultures have their own inertia and you need to get things moving back in the right direction, slowly but surely. Getting a few quick wins on the board will get you the cultural confidence to enact and execute the bolder items in your contingency plan.

By consistently focusing on getting from Point A to Point Z in a methodical manner, you are working how the algorithm would work and also building credibility.

Communicate To The Engines

Matt Cutts (or the army of filters and staff buffering Matt) probably won’t read your plea for help if you are JohnnysFruitStand.com. However, if you are a major brand that got caught out as collateral damage, or even sinned and strayed from the Webmaster Guidelines, you can probably bend their ear.

It is nearly as important for the engines to have you in their index for the queries you are relevant for as they are to your business. Even though sites like BMW and J.C. Penney have strayed, they were inevitably let back in because not having them in Google’s index made Google’s index less relevant.

While you may get your day in court, so to speak, do not waste it or make the engines look bad in the process. Acknowledge your previous actions, atone for them, and include evidence that you have corrected them. Do not be a whiner and absolutely do not try to fight them in the press.

Do Not Let It Happen Again

Mistakes happen. To the extent your site’s performance was hindered due to specific actions, learn from those actions.

No matter what anyone says, SEO is a lot of trial and error, even at the Enterprise level. If you are not testing, you are not trying and any good company culture understands that. Just make sure your contingency plan(s) in place if the tests turn negative.

In Summary

At the end of the day, the number of advantages to being the SEO guy (or gal) at a big brand far outweigh the potential catastrophe lurking in the tall grass at all times.

While there is a lot you can do to make your search traffic stream more defensible on a day to day basis so you do not ever have to enact your contingency plans, never operate without them at arms reach. You are only ever one knob turn in Mountain View from a tail wind turning into a headwind.

Image from Wikipedia page for Mike Tyson, used under Creative Commons.

Enterprise SEO Discussion With Warren Lee, Adobe

Warren is responsible for over ~48 million monthly visits from SEO to Adobe. Warren manages SEO for Adobe.com, Photoshop.com and the many Web properties owned by Adobe.

Prior to Adobe, Warren worked for MOVE inc., where Warren was also an in-house SEO manager responsible for keeping Realtor.com the #1 most visited website in the real estate industry as reported by comScore.

Eric Enge: How do you structure your organization for SEO success?

Warren Lee: A firm awareness of common challenges with enterprise SEO can help prevent SEO disasters before they occur and can enable your search team to create a strategy to achieve the biggest wins.

The main challenges within SEO at large organizations tend to revolve around:

1. Cross functional alignment.
2. Maintaining focus on the critical initiatives.
3. Getting buy-in and support for projects around content growth, optimization, linking, and site architecture improvements.
4. Balancing training and process improvements through involvement with the right functional areas at the right times.

1.  Cross Functional Alignment

The challenge of cross-functional alignment occurs when SEO expertise is siloed in one functional area within an organization. Marketing and IT are the two most common areas SEO teams sit in.

Given that website, technical, and product marketing decisions all influence SEO performance, teams have an inherent challenge with being strategic and cross-functional. At its core, SEO teams must always be a change agent in an organization – most stakeholders do not willingly (assuming they know how) incorporate search best practices into their daily work.

Search Marketing teams that succeed embrace this challenge by making stakeholder engagement and full SEO integration a priority across the organization. This requires that teams first understand all functional groups whose work impacts SEO in order to influence the right stakeholders at the right time.

The ultimate goal being that SEO DNA be integrated early & often into every significant digital asset at your company. Doing this requires a team with the right skillset within an organizational structure and company culture that supports their agenda.

Once that’s in place, SEO teams need to evaluate their own scope of influence across the organization and build relationships with critical partners. Critical partners in a large organization include: Paid Search, Site Search, Social Media, Digital Analysts, IT, Web Ops, Web Security, Legal, Product Management, Product Marketing, Editorial, QA, Mobile, and Remarketing & Site Testing teams.

There is always more to do in Enterprise SEO and therefore all decisions have an opportunity cost. As such, positive influence and organizational change means being savvy with guarding your time and priorities so you keep a balance between the inevitable urgent -hoc requests not crowding out critical & strategic projects.

2.  Maintaining Focus On The Critical Initiatives

The solution to finding a balanced level of service is developing a team culture where project priorities are driven by data & results and supported by effective training, processes, and communication with stakeholders.

In practice, a data-driven decision process looks at the key metrics and KPIs for any project, determines a baseline on which to judge success, and determines appropriate SEO levers to pull based on their impact on metrics, and then puts a realistic project plan in place.

We’ve implemented this process in the last year as a result of hiring a passionate and skilled search team, using our own Digital Marketing Suite, and engaging consistently with both data and stakeholders to influence change.

We also borrowed key elements of the Agile software development process including twice-weekly Scrum check-ins, a running list of possible projects (currently over 150) where we pool the collective knowledge and vote quarterly on priorities, and a bi-weekly Sprint for each major project we’re working on.

A useful method to maintain priority focus involves filtering projects based on the level of impact on the few essentials of SEO: site architecture, internal and external linking, and new or existing content.

Additional projects and criteria include process and workflow optimization, co-optimization of Paid and Organic strategies, and Social Media team engagement. I have previously written about a process for identifying your company’s critical areas of focus and evaluating if your resources are aligned to enable change.

3.  Getting Buy-In

To fulfill the vision shared above requires buy-in and support for content growth and optimization, linking, and site architecture improvements.

Recent research by Rebecca Lieb at the Altimeter Group shows that SEO is often a low priority and therefore doesn’t receive as many corporate resources as online video, social media, or mobile marketing initiatives.

Organizations that overcome this do so through sharing wins to show the value of your involvement and sharing failures or site-wide challenges that impact key metrics.

Highlighting past failures or calling out future ones (if changes aren’t implemented) can be incredibly effective at getting buy-in. In particular, showing what competitors are doing that you’re not is a great catalyst. Taking it a step further to build their practices into strategy and turning that around to teams to implement can demonstrate significant value.

These both show the cost of not being strategic about SEO within your organization. And then be sure to share wins – you can turn stakeholders into SEO ambassadors and fans of your team’s work by aligning up-front on critical KPIs and celebrate mutual success, with data whenever possible.

Never take credit for search wins alone, and be mindful to thank others for their support in the wins, and you will find that getting buy-in becomes significantly easier.

4.  Balancing Search Team Involvement

Balancing involvement across global stakeholders is a challenge for every Enterprise SEO. Three strategies can help: training, accountability charts, and consistent meetings.

Ongoing cross-functional training is critical to impart SEO knowledge & ownership deeper into your org. Without it, a little knowledge (read: ignorance) will go a long way and the implications of not integrating SEO into business processes like content creation, information architecture, or social media linking won’t be fully understood.

Concepts you might cover in training could include:

• How natural search engine traffic is critical to the success of your organization.
• Successful SEO cannot be achieved by the SEO team or marketing consultants alone, it comes from team work with everyone who influences and touches all digital assets – whether this be website content, images and videos, off-site channels like blogs, social, or YouTube.
• If anyone is making changes to the site, there should be some level of interaction with the SEO team – we say “early and often”. The SEO team can prioritize how much interaction, so it’s better to over-communicate than to under-communicate.
• Custom tailoring training for specific teams, such as Editorial, QA, Social Media Leads, or the User Experience team on which SEO best practices impact their work.

It is also important to be mindful not to train yourself completely out of communication with critical partners.

So while creating custom cross functional SEO training is valuable, it is also necessary to establish integrated processes for SEO team involvement within cross functional workflows.

Finding the right touch points within other teams processes is a great method to balance training with search team involvement and helps to ensure that you stay connected with key partners.

After providing training to appropriate groups, it is very helpful to analyze their workflow processes and determine when SEO should be involved & when they can rely on your training.

When other cross functional processes are clearly understood by the search team, the use of accountability charts, such as a DACI or RASCI, is helpful towards finalizing steps towards balanced cross-functional involvement. Integrating with other team’s workflow processes in this way will not only help ensure that you stay connected, but this combined with regular meetings also ensures that SEO is always involved when needed.

Summary

In sum, to overcome the common challenges that can crop up in large organizations, SEO should be involved early and often across well prioritized initiatives. SEO evangelism, relationship building and aligning on key metrics is really critical to creating a culture of SEO.

Eric Enge: Thanks Warren!

If only it were this easy

But that’s not easy. Instead of hundreds of links, you may be looking at thousands, or tens of thousands. Or more. In my experience, a moderately-popular enterprise client can have 30,000-40,000 links from 2,000-3,000 domains.

You need a process, and a few tools, if you’re going to complete this task and maintain your sanity. You have to automate what you can and reduce the steps necessary for any required hand-filtering.

Do We Have To…?

The first question I usually hear from this type of client is: “Why do we even have to check our link profile? We’re a big company. We’ve accumulated lots of links over the years. We’re fine, right?”

Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not just spreading FUD here. Google has made it crystal-clear that they’re cracking down on all manner of ‘over-optimization’, both on- and offsite. Unless you know every SEO tactic that’s ever been used on your site, you need to audit your link profile.

The Tools

To run an enterprise-scale link profile audit, you’re going to need a few tools:

1. A link database. SEOMOZ’s Open Site Explorer or MajesticSEO’s database will work. Using both will work even better. ahrefs has a new tool that’s worth a look, too.
2. Microsoft Excel. Say what you want about Microsquish. Excel is still the most kickass toolset an SEO can have. Google Spreadsheets is awesome, but Excel still has the edge. If you somehow don’t already have it, get it.
3. WHOIS data. You’ll want access to the WHOIS database, either via scripting (see the next item) or through a paid service. The ability to perform bulk WHOIS lookups will save you a lot of time, so paying a bit extra for a service like whoisxmlapi.com could make sense. It’s cheaper than therapy.
4. A Web crawler of some kind. Screaming Frog or Xenu will do the trick.
5. A scripting language. Yes, I said it again. you need to know a programming language. If you don’t, OK, but this would really be a good time to learn.

The 19-Step Process

Here’s how I go about it. Of course, this is not the only way. It’s probably not even the best. I tend to find these shortcuts and design this kind of stuff on the fly.

On the other hand, this process lets me sift through 30,000+ links in less than 3 hours. Which means more Skyrim time – a win-win.

1. Create a ‘whitelist’. That’s a list of domain names that are 100% (cough OK 90%) legitimate link sources.
2. Grab the basic link data from Open Site Explorer and Majestic. Import both into Excel.
3. Combine the two URL lists, including SEOMOZ Domain Authority and/or Majestic ACRank so that you have a single list of all linking URLs. Filter out any duplicates.
4. Pull a list of unique domain names from that list. I use Python to do this. You can use Excel’s Text to Columns feature, too: Split the text up at each “.”, remove any folders and queries, and you should have a list of domain names.
5. Remove any whitelisted domains.
6. Run a WHOIS query on each domain name. Be sure to get the hostname, registrant name and status, at a minimum. Store that in Excel, too. I use Python to perform the bulk lookup. You can also send a list of domains to a paid service and they’ll do it for you.
7. Grab the IP address of each domain. You can use NSLOOKUP to do this, if you want to get all geeky about it. There are a few tools you can add to Excel, or you can script it in Google Spreadsheets. None of this is trivial, I know. It’s the price of success – you wanted your terrifying in-house SEO job for a Fortune 100. Time to pay up!
8. Use Vlookup to combine the domains, WHOIS results and Majestic/SEOMOZ/ahrefs data. It’s important that you have all of this in one place.
9. Now, look for sites that share common registrants. Ignore the private domain registration companies. Yes, that’s a lot of them. But you’ll be amazed how many link networks still operate ‘in the clear’.
10. If you find groups of sites owned by a single person or company, flag them. Why? Because multiple sites under a single owner may be part of a link network.
11. Compare IP addresses, the same way you did registrants. If you have collections of sites under the same IP address, flag those, too.
12. Now you should have a list of flagged domains.
13. Grab those domains and run your Web crawler, fetching the home page of each domain. I use Python for this, saving the HTML for each page for the next few steps.
14. Check the results for phrases that are a dead giveaway for spam: “High pagerank,” “Link building,” “Upgrade your link” and “Free link” are some of my favorites.
15. Get a word and link count for each page. Compute the ratio of words to links. I use Python and BeautifulSoup (an HTML parser for Python) to do this.
16. Pull all this data into your domains list.
17. Score your domains. I use a holistic 1-10 scale: The more ‘spam factors’ in evidence, the higher the score. So a page that’s part of a 10-domain portfolio, has spammy-sounding phrases on it and has a low ratio of words to link will get a really high score.
18. Sort your spreadsheet by score. Then do a quick check of the worst offenders. If they’re spam, get those links removed.
19. Repeat this process as necessary.

Getting Fancy

A few additional, easily-automated steps you can try:

1. Use natural language processing to compare 5 blog posts on any given blog. If they have little or no relation to each other—one’s about pharmaceuticals, and the next is about vacationing in Miami, for example—that could be a spam blog.
2. Check the writing grade level. Super-low or super-high may mean badly written, spun content.
3. Use an automated grammar checker like Queequeg and get an error count. More errors means a higher likelihood of spun content.
4. Check for blog sites using default templates. That’s a sure sign of a spam blog.
5. Check for big collections of footer links. Then look for sites that are interlinked into ‘wheels’ or whatever the link sellers are calling them now.

Accumulate Knowledge

As you do this process, save your data. Keep a list of the best and worst domains, site owners and IP blocks. It’ll make future audits far easier.

Prune, But Also Plant

Of course, don’t neglect authority-building. Your content strategy, social media strategy and branding will help you grow your authority profile even as you prune back your low-quality links.

None of this is easy. But almost all of it can be automated. Put in the time now and you can stay ahead of future Google warnings, improve SEO and build a lasting information asset for your company.

The good news is the main obstacles are fairly universal and there are ways to overcome them. To help you navigate the process, here are nine common enterprise SEO roadblocks and the solutions for each.

Let’s start with a couple fundamental, site-oriented roadblocks:

1.  CMS Deficiencies

Many companies are hamstrung by an outdated content management system (CMS) and off-the-shelf options are not always well suited to the challenges of optimizing large sites.

The solution is often to develop your own CMS. This is a good option but be careful, building a homegrown CMS has proven to be a graveyard of empires for many an enterprise. It is a lot harder than you think and in the end, it will take much more time and resources than expected.

Adding significant customizations to an existing product is not easy either but it tends to be a more realistic way forward. If possible go a step further and incorporate special tools and functions as referenced in Large-Scale Content Optimization Tactics For Enterprise Sites.

A reasonable interim solution is to use a hybrid approach. For instance, publishers that are locked into a legacy CMS will often utilize WordPress on specific site sections. WordPress VIP is a decent option at the enterprise level.

The catch is that a website on a collection of platforms is at risk of becoming more complicated instead of less so. But if your CMS is holding you back and a full-scale migration is not in the roadmap, a partial solution is better than none at all.

2.  Technical Issues

Every site has technical issues in one form or another and large sites tend to have larger problems. Poor indexation or over-indexation; duplicate content; problems with pagination and faceted navigation; inefficient crawl paths; a weak internal link structure that fails to support deeper site content, to name a few.

We don’t need to go through the fundamentals of technical SEO here (or design and template issues for that matter) but without solving these problems, you cannot make significant gains.

The primary solution is to identify the problems and recommend improvements through a comprehensive site audit, the trusted weapon of any good SEO. This is followed by ongoing monitoring (preferably with the aid of an enterprise SEO toolset) and periodic reassessments. Like it or not new issues will never stop cropping up.

But the best site audit in the world will do little more than gather dust if you cannot get past the bureaucratic hurdles that exist at nearly every large organization. Successful, sustainable enterprise SEO often comes down to effective change management.

So let’s focus on roadblocks that are more organizational in nature…

3.  Budget Allocation

Without budget, your SEO efforts are going nowhere. Whether it is all done in-house or outside help is brought in – it takes time, money and resources to make real progress.

As Brian Provost covered in The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO, “free” search results are not actually free and enterprise SEO is not cheap. The technical, editorial and marketing components all require resources, not least of which is capable people to execute the recommendations.

Securing budget means getting executive buy-in, so you need to be able to make the case for SEO and to justify continued investment. Bill Hunt has advocated using a missed opportunity matrix for years. Ian Lurie also offers some good ideas in The Challenge Of Justifying Enterprise SEO.

4.  Poorly Defined Goals & Unrealistic Expectations

A major roadblock to securing ongoing support and resources is often poorly defined goals and unrealistic expectations.

Overall goals like increasing search referrals and conversions are only the beginning. You need to clearly define just what the company is trying to achieve, both at a high level and for specific site sections and content or product types.

Your analytics team plays a vital role here in helping to establish benchmarks and report on progress in a meaningful but easily digestible way.

Goal setting applies to execution too at the department level. Tech, content production and marketing should all have a series of well define goals to measure against.

Along with this comes the need to avoid unrealistic expectations. Executive teams have a tendency to set lofty goals as a way to rally the troops and spur on activity. But if there is zero chance of reaching the goals you will quickly lose hearts and minds.

Managing expectations also means teaching patience. Enterprise SEO is a long-term play with the benefits realized over months and years. Use quick wins and low-hanging fruit to demonstrate its value but make sure everyone understands that SEO is a never-ending process.

5.  The IT Department

The IT department gets a special shout-out since many a technical SEO initiative comes to a grinding halt here.

At the end of the day, the technical teams are going to do what they can to help the organization based on what they have been mandated to do. If SEO projects are not at or near the top of the queue, nothing significant is going to get done.

The solution here is both top-down and bottom up. If you’ve done a good job of making the case for SEO and winning budget the mandate and the resources will be there. Ideally, you’ll even have a certain number of tech team members dedicated full-time to SEO projects.

In reality, however, dedicated headcount is not easy to get and many other groups will be advocating for tech resources just as strongly, sometimes with projects that are more quantifiable. So you’ve got to prioritize your recommendations and do want you can to provide an estimate of impact.

Get as much as you can into the roadmaps and make sure you’re getting the right things pushed through. If you have multiple sites, identify solutions that can be applied across the network.

As referenced above use quick wins to demonstrate value, but find a way to push through some bigger asks too or you won’t get the long-term, sustainable gains that are needed.

For more suggestions, see Ian Laurie’s How To Get The IT Team On Your Side.

6.  Lack Of Consistency

It is one thing to effectively train staff members and give them the tools to succeed. It is quite another for them to consistently apply these things and incorporate them into their daily workflow.

Take content production for instance. It is not that editorial teams do not care about search engine visibility; in fact, they want their content to succeed. It is simply that they will never care about it as much your SEO team does. That’s just human nature and really who can blame them.

The solution is ongoing training combined with spot checking and feedback at regular intervals. Human oversight is always needed.

7.  Lack Of Coordination

The same goes for coordination of efforts between various departments. Every team needs to understand the SEO implications of their work.

Marketing and PR teams in particular need to be well integrated because so much of what they do has a positive impact on SEO, yet so often this impact is not fully realized.

A helpful approach is to appoint an SEO point person for every brand/department/team. This adds a deeper level of integration for the SEO team and creates more direct contact points for staff members with people that speak their language.

8.  Complacency

As Marshall Simmonds pointed out in Why So Many Companies Fail At Enterprise SEO, sites that have done reasonably well in search in the past tend to rest on their laurels over time.

This is a formula for eventual failure. Sooner or later, something will get missed or simply done less well. In addition, the engines are making more changes than ever so there are constantly new things to factor into your efforts.

Enterprise SEO requires diligence and ongoing oversight. Adding new blood to key teams from time to time will bring renewed focus and energy to the program. Conducting periodic outside reviews of your sites, teams and processes is a good way to evaluate and validate your efforts.

Ok, enough about internal processes. Here is one more roadblock that relates to both company and site:

9.  Weak Brand Or Domain

Strong brands and certainly strong domains tend to perform well in search. Leaving the debate on brand signals aside, there are a wide range of indirect benefits for known brands such as increased user trust, higher CTRs and greater engagement.

At the enterprise level, many organizations benefit from having well established brands on authoritative domains. But that is not always the case.

Big site does not automatically equal big brand or strong domain.

Companies have large marketing departments and audience development teams for reason. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a brand, as well as an audience or customer base, in any medium. Online, and specifically search, is no different.

So get your technical issues in check and ensure that you have well optimized templates and content. But make sure you are putting just as much effort in building up brand and domain strength.

Fortunately, you’ll already have many mechanisms in place for this. Just make sure that SEO is being factored into the planning and execution of all marketing and business development initiatives.

Photo from ell brown. Used under Creative Commons license.

1. The search engines keep the details of their ranking algorithms private.
2. There is a lot of bad information and misperceptions that are presented as SEO wisdom online.
3. The algorithms search engines use are frequently changing.

As a consequence of this landscape, it takes real working experience to develop strong SEO skills – you can’t get them without it. Making changes and seeing what works and what doesn’t is simply a must. Even if your SEO team (or SEO agency) has that experience, there are a number of things that you can do to make life difficult for your SEO team.

Let me count the ways …

1.  Focusing On “SEO goals” Instead Of Business Goals

Too many enterprises get focused on goals that are artificial. For example, they focus on building 100 links per month. Seriously now. I can get you 100 links per month for $400 or less and they probably won’t do anything at all for you.

Other bad goals are specific rankings or PageRank increases. Your top level goals should nearly always be: increased relevant, non-branded search engine, traffic (NBSET), and increased conversions from NBSET. Align the SEO team goals with your company goals.

2.  Doing SEO In A Vacuum

SEO impacts a lot of different disciplines. The SEO team needs to be in close coordination with many parts of the enterprise, and those parts of the organization need to be aligned with the goals and what is required to meet them.

3.  Poor Communication With The Dev Team

One common problem is the lack of a strong communication channel, and strong trust between the dev team and the SEO team. One classic example is the 301 redirect. Most tools it seems default to 302 redirects, and the developers need to really be on board with why a 301 is preferred and understand that they need to check and verify it themselves.

4.  Poor Communication With Marketing

Love those pesky marketing folks, really, I do. But sometimes they can make decisions not realizing that what they are doing is blowing up the SEO efforts. I have seen situations where the marketing team insisted on titling pages of their site with their fancy product brand names that don’t have the slightest relationship to a phrase that users ever search on.

5.  Poor Communication With The Exec Team

This is one of the easiest way to throw a wrench in your SEO efforts. One enterprise I know decided to design their site for the C-suite. As a result, they promptly ripped most of the text off of their pages and slimmed down the site into a corporate brochure. Great way to make it very difficult for search engines to figure out what is special about your site!

6.  Poor Education At The Exec Level

It turns out that communication is not enough. The execs need to know enough about SEO to understand what they don’t know, and how and when it matters. Once they understand that, they will be far more likely to get SEO advice about the impact of a decision when they need it.

7.  No Centralized Coordination of SEO

Putting your SEO team in a position where they have to separately sell multiple groups in your organization is really going to hamper their efforts. Having good communication with marketing, development and the execs is necessary, but you also need to streamline it so it is efficient.

8.  Being Over-Focused On One Specific Goal

This happens often, and one of the most common hyper-focused goals is driving traffic on one specific keyword. This narrows your SEO efforts in a way that is too artificial.

In an environment as fluid and undefined as SEO, it is best to allow some freedom to pursue the areas that bring you the fastest/largest ROI. It is usually very difficult to discern where that will come from in advance.

9.  Making Decisions That Impact SEO Without Knowing It (Or Checking)

This is obviously related to the communication and education related problems. However, even if the communication channels are open, it still happens that people make decisions and don’t have the discipline to first ask if there is an SEO concern with the decision. Instill the discipline in your team to ask that key question before committing to that new “great idea” someone has.

10.  The Developer “Knows” SEO

Just like those marketing folks, I love the dev team too. But, it does happen that there are developers who say they know SEO, trust them, everything will be all right. One CTO I encountered insisted that 302 vs. 301 redirects did not matter because there was no way that the search engines would be so narrow in how they interpreted redirects.

Unless that developer has worked full time on SEO for 2 years or more (and I do mean FULL time), they don’t know SEO. They may have learned some things about it, but that is not the same thing as being an expert.

11.  Doing SEO “After The Fact” – Do It Right Or Do It Over!

The most common variation of this mistake is launching a new website or a site redesign and then bringing in the SEO team. What do you mean the CMS I picked is SEO hostile? What? The title tag for every page on the site is required to be the same? There are session IDs on the URLs? Yup, I have seen all of these mistakes and more.

12.  Not Starting SEO Soon Enough (Due To Scope Of Dev Impact)

Even after you get the idea that you must involve SEO planning up front, there is still an issue of not starting soon enough. What if the SEO input leads you to realize that you have to re-architect the site? Far easier to let development know that before they are well down the path. Consider SEO a key part of the product/site requirements definition process.

13.  Keeping Social Media & SEO Separate

Today this is in fact the norm. Yet, there is a huge amount of interaction between social and SEO. For many sites, the best link building strategy going is a combined SEO and social media strategy. Operating these two disciplines in two different silos is a great way to lose a lot of leverage.

14.  Not Coordinating Content Between Social Media, Blog, PR & On-Site

The leverage in having all these disciplines work in conjunction is enormous. However, to make it work, you need to have a consistent, reinforcing, content plan across them all.

15.  Not Leveraging Your PR Efforts

Effective PR can be an awesome tool for generating lots of links and social media activity. Developing a consciousness of this in the PR department and getting them to understand how they can drive SEO and social goodness is a huge win.

16.  Picking A CMS Without SEO Team Input

This is one specific problem that happens frequently enough that I felt I needed to post it here as a separate item. Please … don’t do it.

17.  Finalizing A Site Architecture Without SEO Team Input

This is similar to the CMS line item. There is a lot of useful input that the SEO team can have here. Don’t let the SEO input be the sole source of input to a site architecture as usability and user experience factors are a big deal here, but an awareness of keywords that matter is important to take into account too.

18.  Listening To Bad Or Outdated Advice From Others

Once someone gets to know a little SEO they may start to check out other sources of information. News shocker – but not everything you read about SEO online is accurate.

For example, the article about meta tags on About.com still indicates that keyword meta tags are used by search engines.

You can also read hundreds of articles saying that SEO is dead.

Just bear in mind that we are in the age of irresponsible journalism where far too many people grasp the power of the headline without having an understanding that influence comes with some level of responsibility.

19.  Pursuing A Short-Sighted SEO Strategy Such As Low Quality Links

One of the most frustrating things in SEO is seeing your spammy competitor outrank you while cheating at SEO. Eppie Vojt published a nice case study on SEOmoz about the tactics one spammy site used to rank for the term “car insurance”. I am sure someone at Geico was saying WTF?

Unlike the example in the SEOmoz article where the site got banned from the index, there are many examples that can be shown where these cheaters just keep on ranking. It gets frustrating, and you can get the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” thing going on in your head. Don’t do it.

You don’t want to build your business so it is at odds with Google’s goals. No happy ending there.

20.  Thinking SEO Is More Important Than The End User

This is a way of living in Google’s cross hairs too. SEO is one marketing discipline, and there are many others. Given end users good, valuable “stuff” is one function that can’t be ignored. And Google and Bing are both hard at work on methods for determining what the best “stuff” is and favoring that in your search results.

21.  Constant Tinkering

This is a serious problem in many organizations. I have worked with people that are so wrapped up in tweaking the site over and over again, and their energy would be much better spent on the inbound components of SEO, such as link building, social media, PR, etc.

22. Not Understanding The Broader SEO Landscape

It is important to understand that the landscape is constantly shifting. We had Panda occur on February 24, 2011; Search, plus Your World launch on January 10, 2012; and on January 19th, 2012 we had the Page Layout algorithm which attacked ad heavy sites.

Even more recently, Google’s Amit Singhal was talking about semantic search saying it will impact 10% of results, and Matt Cutts was heard at SXSW saying a major update targeted at over-SEO’ed sites is coming.

Head spinning? The landscape is going to continue to shift. Make sure that you are not mired in specific details of today’s algos and the great majority of your effort goes to tactics that will stand the test of time.

23.  Obsession With SEO

This is one of the things that can lead to tinkering. SEO is important, and you need to pay attention to it. But, it is not life itself. Know what I mean?

24.  On-Page Only SEO

I have seen a lot of this. Major organizations learn that SEO matters and the first thing they do is focus on on-page SEO. Getting started is good, but on-page largely defines relevance for the search engines, and not ranking.

It is often hard for enterprises to deal with the link building side of things because of the problems in coordinating with other marketing disciplines such as PR and social media. Link building does not replace PR or social media or have to be at odds with it. Getting these things to work together brings a lot of leverage, so make sure you go past the “on-page only” stage of SEO awareness.

That’s my list for today! I am sure that there are many other aspects I have overlooked in the above. Please share your ideas/examples/frustrations in the comments below!

I’ve written and presented often on pagination for SEO. Why so much attention on this subject?

The reason is simple: it can be a big, hairy deal for sites. It’s right up there with faceted navigation as one of the most problematic crawling and indexing issues for large-scale SEO. It’s a tactic (actually a set of tactics) that our teams are continually evolving, testing, and refining.

So it was “double prizes” when Google announced the HTML 5 element rel next/prev for pagination.

3 Overall Tactics For SEO Pagination

There are three primary tactics that we use for SEO pagination:

• Classic Method (using noindex)
• View All Method
• Rel Prev/Next Method

Each of these is detailed below.

Classic Pagination for SEO: Using noindex

I’ve already detailed this technique in full, so I’ll skip the nitty gritty. The important thing to realize is that using this method does not directly transfer any equity from a series of component pages to the primary, canonical page. Rather, as component pages get crawled and link back to the canonical page, that equity is (hopefully) transferred as a second-order effect.

We would generally not recommend using this method for pagination today, except for fringe cases. It’s perfectly fine and will not hurt a site; on the contrary, it will greatly help a site that has SEO pagination problems. But, there are now even better methods as we’ll discover.

The classic SEO pagination method uses noindex but does not directly consolidate equity.

View All Method

The most elegant method is to utilize a View All page. In this approach, all component pages rel canonical back to the View All.

There are a few requirements for this approach:

• The View All must load quickly; at least 3 seconds end-to-end. Maile Ohye pointed out at SMX West that even if load times are excessive, if the page can load progressively the user experience will not suffer as much (since content will be viewable on the page immediately).

At SMX West, a few folks complained when I mentioned 3.5 seconds as the maximum load time tolerable for View All pages. The truth is, this is a “real world” goal and while not ideal, reflects the actual load times that we see on large sites.

Just take a look at these ‘last mile’ load times on US retail sites to get an idea of what latency looks like out there. It’s not particularly pretty, but more than anything demonstrates the opportunity these sites have.

• 

  Site latency reports from Google Webmaster Tools

  Our analysis of 20 top ecommerce clients showed an average load time of just over 4 seconds. The fastest site was averaging 2 second load times, an exceptional result in this set. But it was more common to see load times above 3 seconds and well into the 4 second range. While the average load time was 4.2 seconds, the slowest site loaded in over 9 seconds!

Another requirement for the View All method is to ensure all products, or items, that are included on the component pages are featured on the View All itself.

This ensures that there won’t be anything left out of the crawl, as pages annotated with rel canonical tags will not necessarily have links within their HTML crawled. It will also ensure there is a relevant match between what is being folded together in the paginated series.

View All method elegantly passes link equity to the canonical

The benefits of this approach are two-fold:

1. Users tend to love view all pages. In our experience and testing, pages with a lot of products or items all featured at once convert much higher than landing pages with a smaller selection of products. But the pages need to be fast.
2. All component pages in the series transfer their equity to the View All in a fairly direct fashion.

Also something to be aware of: Google will attempt to use your View All page by default, all things considered, when there are no other proactive signals in place. Be aware of this and take steps to control the SEO experience proactively yourself.

The Rel Next/Prev Method

The most current technique for SEO pagination makes use of the HTML 4/5 link element rel=”next” and rel=”prev”. The specifics of this implementation are well detailed in this Google support page, so let’s focus on the benefits and results.

It’s been our experience (especially with e-commerce clients) that it can be difficult to get a View All implemented as the canonical and default page. Merchandising teams don’t always like them; they don’t make holiday or seasonal specials as easy to manage; advanced landing pages can be better looking and UX and content teams often prefer them; they can make spotlighting certain products more difficult; and many other reasons.

Because of these challenges, rel next/prev is often an excellent method for handling pagination.

The benefits of this approach are as follows:

1. All component pages share their equity with the series. What does this mean? Basically, when page 9 of a series gets a link with rich anchor text, that equity is shared across the series with all the other pages. That’s a good thing.
2. However, using rel next/prev doesn’t prevent a component page from displaying in search results. So while these pages will “roll up” to the canonical (or default) page 1, they could still fire at search time if the query was relevant for that specific page. At SMX West, Maile assured us that it would be a very rare thing for that situation to occur. But it could occur.
3. Because of this, an additional recommendation (strictly as an optional step) is to add a robots noindex, follow to the rel prev/next component pages. This would ensure that component pages would never fire at search time.
4. Finally, all rel next/prev pages should also have a self-referencing rel canonical tag. In cases where tracking IDs are appended to a URL, these rel canonical tags will ensure no duplication and equity leak occurs.

Ensure implementation of rel next/prev is thorough

Conclusion & Pagination Recommendations

SEO pagination needs to be recommended situationally (like so much of SEO). Here are my recommendations:

1. If you have a fast loading View All page, and that page contains all the products and/or items included across the component pages, use this method. All component pages rel canonical to the View All, and it becomes your default ranking page in SERPs. It’s elegant, simple, and efficient. It will also best pass equity from each page to a single, canonical URL.




2. If you don’t have a quality View All, or your company doesn’t want to use that as the canonical URL, implement the rel next/prev methodology instead. This method will consolidate signals across the series, rather than concentrate them on a single URL; however, the end result should be the same, if implemented well: the canonical, ranking URL (normally page 1) will be given the equity. There is a substantial benefit in using this method over the classic noindex approach: equity is actually transferred to the series itself.
   
   Remember, the classic method does not directly pass any equity – there are no signals to do so – rather it achieves the same ends by opening up the crawl of component pages and keeping them out of the index and from competing with the ranking URL. Be aware that with rel next/prev, component pages can still fire at search time (although unlikely). You can optionally use a noindex, follow as well to avoid this. Ensure all pages have self-referencing rel canonical tags.




3. There are edge cases where the classic noindex method of SEO pagination is still viable. These are in situations, for example, where it’s important to address Bing consistently along with Google (Bing does not yet support rel next/prev), or when HTML 4/5 elements are not yet ready to be deployed at an organization. In cases like these, the classic noindex method is still a good option.

No doubt this will change again, but here’s the latest for your SEO campaigns. Best of luck and please let me know in the comments your experiences and insights.

Updates: Google’s Maile Ohye has recently published a video on pagination and SEO. Be sure to check it out. Vanessa Fox also covers the details in her thorough treatment of the topic, Implementing Pagination Attributes Correctly for Google.

Welcome to IT - please enter at the door

So, how do you get the IT team to work with you? Work with them.

Make A Case For Growth

Why is IT treated like garbage? Same reason SEOs are: We’re both seen as a cost center, not a value generator. So try something like this:

• Figure out the total ‘universe’. Dig up the total search numbers for your space – the available ‘clicks’.
• Then, get the total number of non-branded organic visits to your site.
• Find the difference between the two.
• Calculate the percentage of organic search visitors who become customers…
• …and the average value of those customers.

With those numbers, you can figure out the total potential sales floating around out there, unrealized. Go to the head of IT. Show them the potential. Information Technology could have revenue attributed to their work.

If they won’t listen to that, move up the food chain, politely, a bit at a time. You may eventually find someone willing to listen. I say ‘may’ because I’ve had 50/50 success with this technique.

Sometimes, folks just ignore the evidence. That’s probably not their fault. Chances are they’re ignoring it because they don’t trust it. They don’t trust it because they’ve been taught, more than once, that SEO is a bunch of hooey.

Which brings me to the next technique…

Build Trust

Find the one, really easy win. A single title tag change, or a tweak to server response codes. Get that one thing done.

Then, track the hell out of it. Know when traffic goes up for that page, and by how much. Know how much revenue that generates.

Next, do it again with another small change.

In between each of these small changes, go do some link acquisition, or whatever will make your bosses happy.

Eventually, this will get folks trusting you, or make it crystal clear that it is hopeless, or demonstrate (yikes) that in this case SEO is not a good investment. At least you’ll get some clarity.

Change Your Name

If everyone’s so dead-set against ‘SEO’, try a few different names for it. Hold on, I’m not being snarky, or cynical, or trying to be funny. This can actually work, because sometimes it’s all about semantics.

Everyone’s been hard-coded that SEO = waste. You need to remap the connection. Reintroduce SEO as one facet of a long-term lead nurturing campaign, working alongside PPC, media buys, etc.

Partner up with the PPC team and do your presentations together under ‘Inbound marketing’. Work with the editorial team on content visibility. Or, work with the IT team on site performance.

It’s All About Creativity

I know what a lot of folks are going to say after reading this: “Ian, I was hired to do SEO, not to run the diplomatic gauntlet.”

Wrong. You were hired to do both. As is anyone hired into a large organization. It’s all about creatively building relationships. Go and build ‘em.

Feel free to rant, or (even better) post positive stories about making SEO work in big, traditional companies below.

Yes, brands are still a very strong signal when it comes to ranking, however, recent advancements like “authorship rank” and Search Plus Your World have hyper-focused our promotion strategies.

A presumption of entitlement drives many legacy brands to complacency. Too often, we see an organization enjoy a few years of strong search results and then relax into “we’ve got that covered” mode, allowing its focus, vital resources and attention to shift to other initiatives.

But it is essential for any in-house marketer/SEO/embedded strategist to push past the corporate ego and bureaucracy to assess and identify changing technical / editorial barriers while protecting the protocol vital to traffic success.

Who’s Watching The Watchers?

The first sign of internal SEO procedures breaking down is often a competitor doing it better, faster and using your own assets. Nothing gets your boss’ attention faster than a competitor outranking you with your own ideas or content—not necessarily via scraping or syndication, but by rewriting or covering popular stories with better optimization.

Sometimes getting beaten is a simple misstep—a missed title tag on your part—but it could also be indicative of larger problems with your content creation process, from execution of best practices to keyword research to XML sitemap inclusion.

In SEO, all roads lead back to editorial. Content producers (who already have plenty to do) find and amplify the voice of a company, guarding the brand’s editorial integrity. But the days of search engine optimization responsibilities falling to another department are long gone.

In this age, content teams are expected to fully understand their audience. In fact, audience cultivation is their obligation. This means content producers must perform regular keyword research around their topics, identifying search and seasonal trends, monitoring news and user behavior and integrating the data back into the workflow, style guides and processes.

A lot of this information is already well known. For example, ask anyone on the editorial team and I’m sure they’ll know if readers use the search phrase “picture” over “photo.” But they can do more.

That’s not to say the SEO specialists shouldn’t be involved as well. SEO advisers can still educate and guide the process. But if keyword research isn’t decentralized, a bottleneck of tremendous proportions can effectively kill this critical step in strategy.

Empowering content producers to mine data raises the internal collective understanding of the audience and how users seek out and interact with a topic. Leveraging readily-available industry data and using it to optimize digital assets is much more effective as a core responsibility than an add-on feature.

Education Is The Basis Of Economic Success

Search awareness works best when raised and maintained by an ongoing, dedicated training and educational schedule. Editorial teams gain and lose new people, design teams are typically on the edge of innovation, tech is making the site better, faster, stronger and so on. But all sectors need regular updates on the micro and macro search strategies that the enterprise seeks to employ.

As an organization, mandatory quarterly or even monthly training sessions or informal SEO meetings keep information fresh and at the forefront. These sessions provide opportunities to talk about industry changes (and there are plenty) as well as tactical responses.

This is the responsibility of the in-house SEO expert. If he or she isn’t constantly “reminding” his or her fellow colleagues why search is always important, SEO—and the poor search director as well—will be forgotten.

Monthly search ranking reports, daily and weekly emails highlighting real-time examples of what worked and what didn’t are just a few of the ways to get in front of those responsible for optimization.

A good SEO will decentralize the process and yet must still be retained at a level above or in-line with tech or marketing, to spearhead projects, stay abreast of changes and aid the teams engaging in massive keyword research projects. SEO directors should be invited to key stakeholder meetings, and be on design and tech’s launch cycle email lists.

While I’m a strong advocate of institutionalizing SEO—educating and holding *everyone* accountable for SEO as it pertains to his/her role and responsibility in the organization—this shouldn’t come at the cost of bureaucratization of the SEO process.

Search engine optimization isn’t an option; it’s a mandate. Those companies that understand this tenant and bake it into their DNA are the very companies your boss emails you about when she’s trolling around on her iPad on Sunday morning.

As organizations grow, attention to procedure and discipline become even more important so that critical steps aren’t overlooked. It’s OK to move content as long as it’s done correctly. Using 301 or rel=canonical seems easy to many of us and yet, too often, entire sections are reduced to vapor due to a missed step.

Being involved and advising on quality assurance methodology, via checklists and education, is the best insurance policy against future mistakes.

SEO vs. Everyone Else

There are instances when decisions are made against best practices and may take precedence over SEO.  This is natural and not necessarily a bad thing. However these decisions must be made fully understanding the consequences.

A designer chooses Flash over HTML for better UX on the new photo gallery? Tech wants AJAX over HTML 5? So be it, as long as everyone involved is aware that it comes at the cost of search ranking.

An editor wants a clever headline that’s eye catching for homepage visitors but doesn’t contain targeted keyword phrases? Fair enough, as long as the choice is made understanding it is no longer a true search opportunity. To be clear, SEO should not come at the cost of editorial integrity. Content first, SEO second. 

This is where the institutionalization of SEO is critical from top to bottom.

Under a strong SEO culture, the first question out of upper management’s or a project manager’s mouth after hearing an initial pitch is “sounds good, but what effect will that have on ranking?”

It is better to build search protocol at all levels rather than retrofitting a project in later stages when resources are fully allocated and attention to SEO is a burden.

The Battle For Budget & Resources

Business cycles naturally draw attention away from SEO.  Social activities, for example, have siphoned resources, budgets and attention away from SEO, much to the dismay of search professionals and the demise of traffic. Make no mistake: search is still the most valuable traffic you can earn.

As my colleague Brian Provost pointed out in his Ultimate Guide to Enterprise SEO, this is about real money. SEO cannot happen in a financial vacuum. Sure it can be bootstrapped, but the process requires a dedicated and permanent budget.

With a modest investment comes better analysis, which gives way to a clearer understanding of customer wants/needs and behavior. Data is gold, but if you’re not measuring it, it doesn’t exist.

It’s The Little Things: Execution = SEO Win

Keeping up with best practices—the seemingly never-ending quest of the SEO cat and mouse game — takes the lion’s share of effort and attention, but must be done strategically. If SEOs took every Google press release to tech and editorial teams, we’d soon be ignored and could even suffer a backlash.

Still, it’s those hungry sites that use the little things — every release, new angles and tech options — as an opportunity for improvement, not a burden, that see the most return on investment.

Ultimately, it’s our job to weigh the level of importance of new discoveries, the timing and how to present new strategies to the enterprise. I’ve found that quick and easy wins with early adopters that we can execute and measure against are the way to win hearts and minds. Creativity is a must.

Last Spring, Powermapper reported changes to page title length. Counts now top out around 70 characters. Normally this may not seem newsworthy, but 5 extra characters can be the difference between branding appearing in a SERP or getting ellipse’d… definitely worth the effort.

Another example: rel=author is an absolute a pain to implement and certainly doesn’t scale (Really?! I have to walk 30+ editors through creating their Google+ profiles?) But it’s worth it.

Reports are starting to come in showing solid increases in CTRs.

Google’s frequent moving of the goal posts is a good thing.

Most of the time it’s productive – improves the search product, new opportunities to leverage assets, levels the playing field and definitely keeps our world interesting – (not to mention it gives us all job security). Then there are the more complex issues such as attempting to figure out how to optimize in a Search Plus Your World, world. Again though, interesting times.

Ultimately the rules are the same for all sites, no matter the URL or brand. In the last few years, I’ve witnessed many scrappy sites that adapt and adopt much faster and keep dedicated resources on standby to take advantage of every new opportunity. All too often it’s the bigger, slower organizations that are losing pace, lulled into complacency based on past performance.

Maintaining SEO efforts through buy-in and advocacy from upper management and tech resources for quick implementation and frequent updates and training put even the biggest companies in a position to maintain ranking and traffic.

The enterprise organization that can execute quickly across the entire network gives its content the best possible chance for placement and ongoing success.