SEO and Big Search - PubCon 2006
This was a really interesting session discussing how large search engines handle SEO for themselves. I never thought about AOL having an in-house SEO manager (though I probably should have since I have seen Yahoo renting links for a few different properties). I realized during this session just how geeky people from Google really are. Adam Lasnik is one of the nerdiest people I have ever seen speak. At one point he used the phrase “can’t touch this.” He actually followed that up by saying - “not to dis on the Hammer at all.” I mean nerdy. He gave a ton of really good information, though.Melanie Mitchell - AOLShe talked a lot about AOL’s reinvention as a media company. They have consistent SEO policies that are implemented company-wide and it must be quite a job with all of the different properties they are managing these days.Dave Roth - YahooDave is a very comfortable, charasmatic speaker. Needless to say he is quite a contrast to his counterpart at Google. Apparently Yahoo focuses on PPC, SEO and affiliate marketing for all different channels. The most interesting thing I picked up from Dave’s talk is that Yahoo bribes different divisions to implement SEO techniques with their PPC budget. It seems like a more effective way to champion SEO best practices would be to convey the long-term benefits to the different decisions, but that’s just my opinion. Oh, by the way, Dave Roth is hiring SEO’s if anyone is interested. Sorry I don’t have his contact information but it can’t be too hard to find online.Adam Lasnik - GoogleThis was a bit different than the other two talks because Google doesn’t actually SEO their properties. He said they do use best practices, but they don’t have a central department enforcing compliance with certain practices. I guess you don’t have to worry too much about PageRank when you determine it.Here are my notes from his talk:SNACC attack for SEOSpeed - throughput and latency are important to the engine (especially latency) - ie, how long after you click on something does it take for something to actually happenNavigation - no 2 links on a page should go to the same destination; easy to find where to go, how to get there and how to get backAccessibility - reasonable URL’s, useful alt tags, accessible search and audio CAPTCHA’s (I’m still not sure what this means)Clarity - links are clearly links - blue and underlined is the preferenceComfort - easy to read, no jumpy pages; avoid italics; assign the height & width on all images (not doing so can make the page appear to jump when images load)Adam also strongly suggested using one central domain rather than a bunch of different domains. He points to Google’s success (all properties are subdomains of google.com rather than different domains). He concluded that all in all the best SEO is finding new ways to make your customers happy and the engines will eventually catch on to these things and give you higher rankings.
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I think that’s really interesting that Yahoo rents links (I didn’t know that until I saw it in the agenda for the show and it surprised me — oh well, makes me feel better about doing it.
Thanks for all the SEO info. I think I’ll send Dave my resume.
Comment by cameron — November 15, 2006 @ 6:23 pm
awesome
Comment by Jon — November 17, 2006 @ 5:54 pm