Below is live coverage of the Keynote Panel : Enterprise Level SEO Inhouse panel from the PubCon 2011 conference.
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Barry Schwartz:
9:01:21 am
Starting soon...
Barry Schwartz:
9:02:44 am
Not sure what the hold up is...
Barry Schwartz:
9:03:22 am
Barry Schwartz:
9:05:36 am
Starting in two minutes.
Barry Schwartz:
9:06:19 am
Barry Schwartz:
9:09:45 am
Here we go...
Barry Schwartz:
9:10:02 am
Barry Schwartz:
9:12:34 am
Alex Bennert, Director of Search Strategy, Wall Street Journal
Barry Schwartz:
9:13:37 am
She talks about how she got into SEO and so on... I am going to skip their backgrounds
Barry Schwartz:
9:13:47 am
Jeff Preston, SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group
Barry Schwartz:
9:13:56 am
Topher Kohan, SEO Coordinator, CNN.com
Barry Schwartz:
9:15:11 am
Barry Schwartz:
9:19:21 am
Still waiting for the intros to be complete.
Barry Schwartz:
9:20:38 am
Question: What is your number one success and the results of that success?
Barry Schwartz:
9:21:21 am
Alex: Hard to nail down the #1. For us moving to first-click-free program made her job much easier. (google first click free if you do not know what it is)
Barry Schwartz:
9:22:03 am
Alex: Also the implementation of the canonical tag across the site was very helpful. Because the 301 process was a nightmare.
Barry Schwartz:
9:22:28 am
Alex: 3rd thing was getting them to have the sitemap feed update on demand.
Barry Schwartz:
9:23:40 am
Jeff: Disney has to be very engaging and fun. His biggest accomplishment is optimizing a dynamic CMS driven Flash site. Once they figured that out, Disney.com became a very friendly place.
Barry Schwartz:
9:24:45 am
They basically feed the XML content from the CMS into a div on the page and then have the flash read the div on the page to populate.
Barry Schwartz:
9:26:48 am
Topher: He started there during the election process with Obama. The thing they did in 2008, they did some AJAX stuff with reporting on how the elections were going. They used the noscript tag was used to show content that spiders could not get. It was the single largest night of traffic they received from search engines.
Barry Schwartz:
9:27:56 am
Barry Schwartz:
9:29:02 am
They are all trying to out do each other saying which story topics sent the most traffic.
Barry Schwartz:
9:29:18 am
Question: Number one failure moment?
Barry Schwartz:
9:30:17 am
Topher: 2010 mid term election was a disaster for him. They didn't rank for basic terms. 2008 pages were showing up for 2010. He though he was fired. That taught him more than anything else.
Barry Schwartz:
9:31:11 am
Jeff: People give titles to shows, "Ant Farm" is one movie another movie like "Cars" and "Brave" and they want to rank well for those generic keywords. Even with months to prepare.
Barry Schwartz:
9:32:54 am
Alex: The mistake she made was to have the same dialog with the same people. She used the same message for IT that she used for product team that she used for executives and editorial. There is a lot departments that don't need to know about.
Barry Schwartz:
9:35:32 am
Jeff: One more mistake.. They have like 500 people on their site. There were a couple of times their SEO specs were not met. The site launches and it doesn't get done. So there were times he blew up at the developer. He learned to give the developer the benefit of the doubt because it is normally the developers boss who told the developer not to do.
Barry Schwartz:
9:36:05 am
Question: One tip for in house SEO that is scalable for smaller companies?
Barry Schwartz:
9:36:41 am
Jeff: If you have a team, make sure as the SEO purpose, you are involved with every team. If there is a PR meeting, be there. If there is a product meeting, go there. You are going to a lot of meetings but you need to be visible.
Barry Schwartz:
9:37:41 am
Alex: That is a good one... Initially go to more meetings that you need to and then know which meetings you should be out. Get into the product cycle, make SEO part of the process.
Barry Schwartz:
9:39:48 am
Topher: (1) Manage the SEO appearance of your company. He has managers that read, read stuff like Search Engine Land. So someone writes site speed is a ranking factor and they go crazy. It is about managing these people who read through education.
Barry Schwartz:
9:40:55 am
(2) If you are the first SEO in the company, you are the enemy because you make cause them more work. You need to show them how it isn't more work, just work differently and more and more people will look at your pages and your content.
Barry Schwartz:
9:41:57 am
Alex: You should be the source of internal SEO information. Regular SEO sessions monthly. Internal Newsletters or blog.
Barry Schwartz:
9:42:39 am
Open Q&A time...
Barry Schwartz:
9:43:40 am
Don't start right away in a big agency, start small... The transition is huge.
Barry Schwartz:
9:44:27 am
Oaky, next session on links with juice at 10:15 am PDT
