This session was moderated by Joe Morin. This panel will discuss how and when search engines SEO their own sites and what optimizers and site owners can learn from their experiences.

Melanie Mitchell — Director, SEO/SEM for AOL

AOL had to completely change their business model as soon as broadband took over — their dialup biz was done. SEO is now part of their business goals and in their mission statement. They don’t look at the “AOL homepage” anymore. They need to “market the plays and not the theater”. They did this by:

1. Build program. Created channel team leads. Created SEO core group working towards common goals. Identified issues and prioritized channels to support program.
2. Optimize assets. Increased number of ranked pages in search engines. Raised quality of rankings (i.e., higher placement). Optimized existing pages to increase AOL’s presence on web.
3. Optimize existing pages. Tracked & reported the same set of metrics with consistent methodology.
4. Increase consistency. Defined “SEO-compliance” standards and developed training internally. Drove a consistent approach to SEO strategy for products & programming. SEO needs to be part of the company’s DNA.

What does this all translate to? They are seeing page views increase month over month and have had a 46% increase in ad revenues for Q3 ‘06.

She uses this example: superbowl commercials and how they rank #2 there in Google. Editor’s note — if it’s spelled correctly as Super Bowl commercials, they rank #4. From Jan ‘06 to Feb ‘06 they saw a 60% increase in traffic from organic search and a 130% increase in page views.

AOL is really serious about SEO. It’s part of their company culture at this point.

Dave Roth — Director, Search Marketing for Yahoo

Dave gave a funny story about his name (David Lee Roth) and how after getting kicked out of radio, Yahoo! called. Dave is obviously – just kidding…

Everyone knows SEM is the best way to acquire customers, even if you are a search engine. Yahoo! has extensive campaigns in SEO, paid search and affiliate. They are involved for a large number of their properties and a variety of different biz models:

1. Subscription
2. Conversion
3. Transactional
4. Lead generation
5. CPM revenue

How do they track all this? LTV (lifetime value) optimization. What is the lifetime value of a conversion? They have a monthly scorecard for all biz units and channels to track. They use this for SEO/PPC/Aff.

Central groups provide internal resources for their employees. EVERYONE gets SEO training (basically everyone who comes through the front door). They establish the standards. All “products” must be SEO compliant before release.
Biz Units/Properties need to assign points of contact per property and evangelize SEO implementation.

ROI talks very loud at Yahoo. They struggle with “Build vs. Buy.” Build to your core business and buy the rest. SEO is mostly about training and trying.

Adam Lasnik — Search Evangelist at Google.

Adam is best known to the Pubcon community because he was a very active member of WMW as thatadamguy.

Adam’s main job is to improve relationships between Google and webmasters.

Google’s super secret sauce, as he calls it, is SNACC Attack! Speed, Navigability, Accessibility, Clarity, Comfort.

Speed counts. He points to Marissa Myers — Speed Wins talk.

Navigation. Users should be able to easily know where they’re going, know how to get there and be able to share a page with themselves or a friend. Your back button should always go back. No two links should point to the same page.

Accessibility. Use reasonable URLs, useful ALT tags and accessible search and audio captchas. He points to Google’s messing up of this: adsense.google.com vs. google.com/adsense.

Clarity. Links should be obvious links (underlined links).

Comfort. Make text easy to read (black text on a white background is boring but clear). Try to avoid italics. No jumpy pages.

One extra C:

Consistency. Routine can be rewarded.

SEO at Google is basically non-existent. It’s not Adam — it’s bigger than one person or group.

So what about “real” SEM?

PageRank is a non-issue for them. Integration is a tree-like and web-like structure. They try to keep pages simple and use the same domain (eBay is a bad example of this). Having all your good content on one domain is so much better than on a bunch of different URLs. Be smart about AJAX/Flash. Use 301 redirects — so important.
Adam’s conclusion — Yes, it really comes down to making the user happy.

Q&A –

I asked Melanie about the recent Washington Post article that only 15% of their pages being SEO’ed. She says they look at it on a yearly basis because “we are new at this”.

Someone asked Adam about 301s. He basically said “Try not to do everything at once.” An example of doing everything at once — work in groups. 301 like pages to like pages.

Someone asked David & Melanie about the key learnings that surprised them about their companies and SEO. David was surprised that one of the people at Yahoo! who basically was “in charge” of SEO was an engineer and that there really weren’t any tactics or central strategy. For Melanie it was how each channel looked only at the other channels within AOL as competitors for the “homepage,” and now they have to look at everyone as competitors for search rankings.

Someone asked about the Google Sandbox and Adam’s take on it. Adam says imagine there is a breaking event and they just waited to report on it. He says there are circumstances when there is a wait time. In terms of a flat sandbox — it wouldn’t be in their interest or in the interest of their users.

BTW – where was MSN live.com?

Bookmark this post: