Paul Sizemore

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  Paul Sizemore 10:38 pm on November 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: SEO   

  Maximizing the pages indexed on your site 

  I recently had a client come to me and say ‘We just launched a new site, now what SEO should we do?’ My first thought, was that they had missed the boat, but I didn’t tell them that. That’s a lesson they will learn before they launch the next site or feature. 

  Minutes after running the YSlow Firefox/Firebug add-on, I noticed some low hanging fruit. No HTTP compression on their server. 

  I told them, ‘Just do it.’ They had to ask why. 

  First, it will save you bandwidth, and bandwidth is money, right? Here’s a nice case study from IBM that details the bandwidth impacts server compression has on overall bandwidth. 

  Second, and more important, because engines only index pages to a certain volume, the rest of the page is lost. Implementing it is a change that not only reduces the bottom line, but provides growth into new areas of SEO. 

  According to Sitepoint the engines stop points are:

       Yahoo:    210 kb

       Google:  520 kb

       MSN:      1020 kb

  That means most pages with a footprint more than 210 kb in download size will not be indexed completely by yahoo, and that’s something that could be tragic. 

  Links: 

  IIS HTTP Compression: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/502ef631-3695-4616-b268-cbe7cf1351ce.mspx?mfr=true

  Apache HTTP Compression: http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/web-output-mod_gzip-apache

  YSlow: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
   

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  Paul Sizemore 2:50 am on November 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: SEO   

  Srsly? SEO Expectations, realistic expectations 

  Often time business SEO stakeholders are not SEO savvy, and therefore might have unrealistic expectations. Education is the key, and relating the SEO efforts is quality reporting. 

  Stakeholders often look for immediate results in rankings, and that they will maintain a steady curve increase. This isn’t the case, report on the incoming traffic, and not the rankings. SEO will increase the organic inbound traffic, and stakeholders can understand this if it’s communicated to them. 

  Stakeholders also often feel that since the research was done on a keyword, the site should rank on that keyword. Certain keywords are more difficult to rank on than others, and the process of the search engine crawling the site varies. There are also a lot of other variables that factor in, and it’s not a 100% process. No business process is 100%. 

  When stakeholders see numbers it sets an unrealistic expectation. The numbers, the rankings and the analytics often set a false sense that the entire process is as sharp, defined and quantitative as the numbers. This isn’t the case. I like to relate it to the stock market, it’s up and down, but there is a trend. This analogy resonates with a lot of stakeholders.
   
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  Paul Sizemore 7:32 pm on October 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: SEO   

  SEO in the Enterprise 

  Enterprise Search Engine Optimization differs from SEO in the enterprise because one is a business process that ensures continued success, the other is based around the knowledge of a single person that currently works in the enterprise. SEO is about long-term success with the search engines, and to be a success in that, there has to be a business process in place that ensures the long-term and continued success of SEO. 

  A talented person can do all the SEO tasks, the technical side, writing good content, link building and the metrics, but in an enterprise that doesn’t work. Those activities are often charged with different departments, with different management techniques and inherent communication difficulties. When one person tries to do it all, they often run up against gaps in departmental approval. 

  Good SEO couples the increasing the top line of Marketing with the reducing the bottom line of IT. 

  In addition to the communication and role-responsibility problems, most enterprise SEO is charged with large scale optimization over complex sites. This creates it’s own unique set of problems from duplicate content, multiple owners, and millions of pages.

  The single most important aspect of enterprise SEO is corporate buy in. Once that is achieved, all the rest can follow, but without that, SEO is doomed to die in the boardroom, then in the trenches. Conductor has some great excel templates that can help persuade executive level the importance of SEO. They include a ‘Marketing Opportunity’ and ‘Share of Search’ templates. 
   
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  Paul Sizemore 6:26 pm on October 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: SEO   

  Post-Domain Decommission Cleanup 

  Yesterday a client asked, we moved to a new domain name, but all the pages from the old domains are still in the search engines. What can we do about it? 

  It appears that the engines have indexed the pages from the old domains, but they are not reindexing those pages. Right now, they are are ’301ing’ requests for the old domain to a new domain, and most of the pages that were indexed were in the lower levels of Google’s Index. The pages are in the Supplemental or Secondary index. The ’301′ response to the search bot would take care of it, but the engines aren’t indexing the site. So, the engines don’t know that the pages have changed. 

  The engines need to reindex the site. This will return the ’301′ redirects that will update the index. 

  Since they still owned the domain, they could still establish a webmaster account for the domain with the engine’s webmaster tools, and then verify the domain by uploading the validation HTML template. 

  That can be done at the following URLs: 

      Bing Webmaster Tools – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

      Google Webmaster Tools – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

      Yahoo SiteExplorer Tools – https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ 

  Once the validation is done, create a new ‘sitemap.xml’ file, and submit the sitemap to the search engines. One of my favorite tools to create sitemaps is : http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ Point the sitemap starting URL to one of the validation HTML files, and the sitemap will only have one entry. 

  Once the sitemap is submitted, this will cause the engine to reindex the old domain, thus removing all the older pages in the cache. 

  
  
  

  See the full gallery on Posterous
   
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  Paul Sizemore 9:39 pm on October 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: SEO   

  SEO in the Enterprise / crossing silos with governance 

  SEO in the enterprise faces it’s own unique challenges, among them are establishing buy-in and touch points cross silos. Enterprise level SEO is best achieved when knowledge and appreciation saturate the entire corporate culture.Oportunities arise throughout the environment, and unless they are capitalized on by the department with the touch points to those opportunities, then they are lost. 

  SEO in the enterprise is best accomplished by SEO governance, accountability and education. Many departments in organizations feel that since they are not in the trenches of SEO, they don’t have to be concerned about it, but a solid reporting and education program can help alleviate that feeling.  

  The discipline of SEO in the enterprise needs to liaison not only between IT and Marketing, but between the product side, sales and design. 

  Creating a business process to implement SEO is the only way to ensure long-term commitment to SEO in a corporate environment. That process needs to be based on best practices, and incorporated into the business workflow.