[Live] SMX Sydney ’13 – Programmatic Optimisation

Speaker Profile:

Name: Bill Hunt

Company: http://back-azimuth.com/

Twitter: @billhunt

Google+: https://plus.google.com/102882782290769103406/posts

Notes:

• Programmatic Optimisation is all about – Leverage templates, business rules and data structures to achieve optimisation scale and performance
• Always start with setting up Business Goals
• IBM catalog used to be block by spiders – WOW!
• Bill is showing examples of how be applied his programmatic optimisation when he was at IBM where he was the only search guy looking after a Global company
• simplified and reduced template resulting in savings of 3k annual man hours
• IBM created a uniform XML sitemap tech that resulted in 98% of pages indexed and 150% redirection of error
• Intro paragraph improved snippet relevance and clicks by 3000%
• IBM saw 82% of tier 1 phrases in all markets ranking on page 1
• 8000% increase in traffic in first 30 days
• Exponential increase in sales immediately after indexing
• Inclusion, relevance, authority, clickability – SEO pillars
• Realign priorities to Scale, create a framework to help with programmatic optimisation
• Maximise templates at the design level – make sure designers understand template opportunities and risks. Find the person responsible.
• develop building rules into CMS integration
• Optimising the templates reduces the amount of work necessary in the local markets
• Set rules within the CMS – what is the title structure, meta data structure, etc
• Have fail process in template – if SEO is no good and compliant, do not publish
• Mark up wireframes from creative agencies and identify issues early
• Fight to be part of the wireframe process before it goes in to coding before it is too late
• Bill believes that you should build the database first then the website not the other round
• Create rules/ and formulas for meta-data structures
• Make sure you understand your CMS in order to scale
  • How to insert content from a db
  • template creation and restrictions
  • page management
  • error management
  • redirect management
• Create a workflow structure on the web development process and start identifying where SEO should be involve and where QA needs to be
• Bill uses SEO for Firefox to evaluate keyword frequency audit on a page
• Segment your XML sitemaps by product categories, lines of business and country
• Great for engines and great for management
• Eaier to monitor crawl rates
• Ensure that XML sitemaps have less than 1% error rate
• Verify URLs in sitemaps with Screaming frog to ensure that they return 200
• Make sure the format is CORRECT
• Create a Search Engine Style guide for conformity – incorporate SEO guide in negotiations with developers
• Have a content colloboration matrix – find our what resources are available in-house
• Leverage scorecards for governance
• Monitor Duplicate title tage in GWT – listen to what google tells you in GWT
• Tools – Bing and Google Webmaster Tools, SCreaming Frog, ISS SEO tools, SEO tools for excel

Disclaimer:
Please excuse the typos, broken links, incomplete sentences, etc.