Below is live coverage of the Marketer to Developer Translation from SMX West 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by both Barry Schwartz, the editor of the Search Engine Roundtable and Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed. In addition, you can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog.
| Marketer to Developer Translation | (02/10/2009) Powered by: CoveritLive |
1:11 | Barry Schwartz: 5 minutes until this session starts... people straggling in from lunch... |
| 1:15 |   |
1:16 | Barry Schwartz: Vanessa welcomes everyone back |
1:17 | Barry Schwartz: basically, this is about how developers ask marketers for stuff and marketers ask developers for stuff.... |
1:18 | Barry Schwartz: Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft is first up |
1:18 | Barry Schwartz: He is going to talk about communication issues and it gets harders as companies get bigger and bigger. |
1:20 | Barry Schwartz: Marketers need data and engineers have that... |
1:20 | Barry Schwartz: Marketers need the ability to run experiments |
1:21 | Barry Schwartz: marketers need the ability to update text on the web site |
| 1:21 |  |
1:23 | Barry Schwartz: Every web site should have a blog |
1:23 | Barry Schwartz: I personally find that to be a strong statement... |
1:24 | Barry Schwartz: He then polls the audience on what they find to be important |
1:24 | Barry Schwartz: He then shows some examples... ill post some slides... |
1:26 | Barry Schwartz: He talks about how what people are searching for is not always what marketers call their products |
| 1:27 |  |
1:28 | Barry Schwartz: Whart developers need... - Data - Timeline - Details and structure (tell them what you need) |
1:30 | Keri Morgret: Martin Bowling is up next. |
1:30 | Keri Morgret: How you go from creative to creation. |
1:31 | Barry Schwartz: See Keri is picking up the blogging :) |
1:31 | Keri Morgret: Do a pre-flight checklist. - Competitive analysis - Who's your audience? - What is the tone? - What are your project goals? -- Rankings? -- Social? - Sites you like/sites you don't like - Emerging Trends - Budget |
1:32 | Keri Morgret: Next is brainstorming. Don't exclude anyone. This isn't a one dimensional process. You need people from different perspective, and can also get better buy-in this way. |
1:32 | Barry Schwartz: Take notes... don't miss a point |
1:32 | Barry Schwartz: Be creative, don't over direct your creative team |
| 1:33 |  |
1:33 | Keri Morgret: Provide your dev team with a technical brief. Tell your team about sites that you like, etc. |
1:33 | Keri Morgret: Mockups and workflow. Have creative do the mockups, dev team do workflow, make sure that stuff is actually reasonable. |
1:34 | Keri Morgret: What happens when you ahve too much flash? use altneratives like jquery for example. css-tricks.com, ajaxrain.com, others good for inspiration. |
1:34 | Keri Morgret: After the concepts are done -- have some fresh eyeballs in there. |
1:35 | Keri Morgret: Releasing into wild -- first stress test the code, look at your hosting requirements. Be sure not to release a crashed site! |
1:37 | Keri Morgret: Eric Enge is up now. |
1:38 | Keri Morgret: Developers have goals -- help grow the business, robust code, work on fun stuff, don't get drawn into stupid projects by marketing. |
1:38 | Keri Morgret: Marketers also have goals. Help grow the business, promote the website, stop development from working on stupid projects, two martini lunches. |
| 1:39 |  |
1:39 | Keri Morgret: Showing some great charts about how to explain SEO concepts to people. |
| 1:40 |  |
1:40 | Barry Schwartz: They keep giving Todd a really hard time |
1:41 | Barry Schwartz: Eric goes over some canonical issues with URLs |
1:42 | Keri Morgret: These are great slides to explain the necessary concepts in a simple way. |
1:43 | Keri Morgret: He shows a slide about canonical redirects in IIS and how they can be a pain. There are tools out there like ISAPI redirects that make it much easier. |
1:43 | Barry Schwartz: He then talks about the issues for duplicate content |
| 1:45 |  |
1:45 | Keri Morgret: Don't waste your crawl budget -- if you
have duplicate pages, you're not going to get as many original pages
indexed as you would like |
1:46 | Barry Schwartz: He shows Drupal issues with duplicate content issues, many CMSs have these issues |
1:47 | Keri Morgret: Shows a complicated slide -- just because problem is easy to explain doesn't mean it's easy to fix. |
1:48 | Keri Morgret: We're all going to throw big watah bottles at Carolyn. |
| 1:48 |  |
1:49 | Barry Schwartz: Keri is apologizing already |
1:49 | Barry Schwartz: She then goes on a rant about how she struggled with the marketing folks at her job |
1:50 | Barry Schwartz: marketers cannot defend themselves against their techs, she said |
1:50 | Keri Morgret: Carolyn is the one giving the rant, Keri is still apologizing. |
1:50 | Barry Schwartz: I actually meant Carolyn is apologizing... sorry |
1:51 | Keri Morgret: Show a slide introducing project management and the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and talking about how it worked in context of large and complex sites. |
1:51 | Keri Morgret: It doesn't matter what business model you're using, SEO is always thought of as an afterthought, she'll come fix things after we're out the door. |
1:52 | Keri Morgret: Businesses don't understand why they need SEO in the development process. They think it's all magic, just Adwords, voodoo, or stuff you do only after the site launches. |
1:53 | Barry Schwartz: SEO belongs everywhere in the web site creation process |
1:54 | Barry Schwartz: Her company was going to buy a content management system for $250k, hard to undo that, if it is not SEO friendly |
1:54 | Keri Morgret: Carolyn starts giving horror stories about a previous experience about being brought in too late and using expensive tools that don't do the job right. |
1:55 | Keri Morgret: Carolyn is now explaining why SEO needs to be in all phases. |
| 1:55 |  |
1:55 | Barry Schwartz: Vanessa Fox is reading this while she is moderating this panel! |
1:56 | Keri Morgret: In design, you can help avoid making everything in Flash, having identical meta tags or having a manual override so you have to write 30,000 meta tags by hand. |
1:56 | [Comment From Vanessa Fox] Hey now, that's not a pic from today! ;) |
1:56 | Barry Schwartz: @Vanessa Fox, true - stole it from Google.... |
1:57 | Keri Morgret: In the design phase, the developers may not even know all of the stuff they should be implementing. It's so much easier to get features in there when the site is still being developed. |
1:58 | Barry Schwartz: This is what I look like, when I live blog.... |
| 1:58 |  |
1:58 | Keri Morgret: You're about ready to launch. Check that things actually work, that all of those wonderful features that are in there aren't broken. |
1:59 | Barry Schwartz: okay, sorry for distracting, but you see, I am trying to show how you need to make things simple and not make things more complex then they have to be... i.e. keep it simple for SEO purposes... |
1:59 | Keri Morgret: "To everyone else, if it looks like it worked right, they're happy. They don't know what to look for under the hood. YOU DO." |
2:00 | Keri Morgret: People may not want to hear what you have to say. You're changing the way they're doing things, you're giving them more work, and they don't see why this stuff needs to be done. |
2:01 | Barry Schwartz: Cshel.com rocked, good job! |
2:01 | [Comment From John] SEO needs to be a business driven priority or devs won't want to spend time on it. |
2:01 | Keri Morgret: Vanessa is making fun of Barry. |
| 2:03 |  |
2:03 | Barry Schwartz: live pic of Vanessa Fox |
2:03 | Barry Schwartz: CShel is the "search cheerleader" |
2:03 | Keri Morgret: Carolyn knows everything and is the internet chick. |
| 2:04 |  |
2:04 | Keri Morgret: You need to be out there reminding people that search needs to be involved, tell them why it needs to be involved, go yell if they do stuff without asking you, and eventually (usually) they'll learn. |
2:05 | Barry Schwartz: Vanessa said the developers need to know why they are being asked to do something.... |
2:05 | Keri Morgret: Because developers can sometimes have three ways to do something, and it looks the same to the user, and don't know how the different ways might impact SEO. |
2:06 | Barry Schwartz: Everyone just wants to be involved... how cute... |
2:07 | Barry Schwartz: Eric explains it is about aligning the goals of the internal players |
2:08 | Barry Schwartz: Vanessa asks us, what are the top ten things to be built in to the development process.... |
2:09 | Keri Morgret: Nathan: get people involved, and get them involved early. |
2:09 | Keri Morgret: Nathan: educate people. Metrics, make sure everything is instrumented. |
2:10 | [Comment From John] Feedback to the team that SEO is helping to meet business goals. |
2:11 | Keri Morgret: Martin: Keep your code clean. Keep CSS, javascript in other places. |
2:12 | Barry Schwartz: oh no, cshel just said "silo" --- good thing Lisa Barone isnt in the room |
2:12 | Keri Morgret: Vanessa is showing us a page on janeandrobot.com that has lots of resources for developers. Ajax, flash, asp.net, iis, apache, etc. |
2:13 | Keri Morgret: janeandrobot.com/admin/Pages/seo-developer-resources.html |
2:13 | Barry Schwartz: Vanessa disses SEOs, saying there is an orielly conference coming up, not for SEOs but only for developers |
2:15 | Barry Schwartz: How do you convince people SEO is worth while? You can't say doing X will lead to 10% higher conversions, you can't say that... |
2:17 | Keri Morgret: How do you decide what metrics to use? Fun part of what the boss wants and what keywords s/he cares about vs. visitors and conversions. |
| 2:17 |  |
2:17 | [Comment From Anne Haynes] wow this is cool |
2:18 | Barry Schwartz: @Anne, thanks! More live sessions coming up right after this one. |
2:19 | Barry Schwartz: NAthan said, Microsoft.com has five different CMSs and that decision has been made |
2:20 | Barry Schwartz: Nathan said there are always other options (at DNS level, building on top of CMS) but then there is prioritzation |
2:20 | [Comment From Anne Haynes] Wow 5 CMSs that seems like way too many |
2:20 | Barry Schwartz: Carolyn one ups Nathan saying she worked at an 80 year old company, while Nathan works at MSFT (30 year old) |
2:21 | [Comment From Anne Haynes] oh come on people keep it clean |
2:21 | Barry Schwartz: Nathan said, never say "I told you so" to the devs |
2:22 | Barry Schwartz: Carolyn likes saying "I told you so" plus she dances when she says it.... |
2:22 | [Comment From Anne Haynes] ROFL |
2:23 | Keri Morgret: Eric talks about how they actually pulled the plug on the project and get things fixed they way it should be before it was launched. |
2:24 | Keri Morgret: Martin has also found sites where doing it over was the best option. |
2:24 | [Comment From Anne Haynes] It's always less expensive than doing SEO after the fact |
2:24 | Keri Morgret: He's telling a horror story about one site where they had to rebuild 27,000 pages, but it was really the only option. |
2:25 | Barry Schwartz: That pretty much wraps up this session... Next session is coming up in 35 minutes.... |
2:25 | [Comment From Anne Haynes] 27,000 pages - I would shoot myself without a CMS |
2:25 | Barry Schwartz: Check www.seroundtable.com in about 30 minutes for our next live blogging session |
2:25 |  |
