Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

SEO Process – In House SEO

December 12, 2008

Are you either contemplating working on the client side or “in house”? Well, I have some helpful information to share with you.I have now been working in house managing both SEO and SEM for a little over six months. The experience has been very rewarding as compared to my days both working on my own as a consultant and within an agency. There are many more groups internally to connect with, domestically and worldwide. This makes it even more important to stay organized and on task.  I was recently asked by one of our sister companies SEO team to assist with SEO process and  share best practices. This is obviously one of those much needed conversations to have. When I attended SMX in NYC a few months back, Jessica Bowman, of seoinhouse.com was one of many speakers on the subject.  Jessica shared many familiar in house stories, working with the development team and having them completely buy into your SEO plans is a task to be undertaken, but one that is imperative to your success. I began by creating an SEO Best Practices Guide for the technical team, this did not include anything your editorial or marketing team might be concerned with, but rather a good comprehensive list of Do’s and Dont’s such as:1. Each page must include unique title &  description 2. Include correct HTML, no Title is not a meta tag. I present my technical team with an excel workbook of SEO recommendations line by line including correct HTML so no one misinterprets how this should be written.3. Semantically correct Header tags – H1 followed by H2, H3, etc. Only include (1) single Header tag that should follow the Title tag on page.4. Include Alt attributes on all images – this is especially important to Yahoo.5. Include the NOYDIR and NOODP Meta Tags <meta name= “robots” content=”noodp, noydir”/>6. Setup a Google and Yahoo webmaster account for all your properties – this will help you see any possible issues either of the search engines may be having with any of your pages, any extra insight is always helpful and it’s free. *Also, I would recommend augmenting your existing analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, etc with the lovely Google Analytics – it doesn’t appear to slow down page load time from what I can tell and really gives you a great glimpse into things you might not see in your other programs. 7.  Create an XML sitemap – following the protocol set forth by www.sitemaps.org.8. Dealing with JavaScript, which is not so much about whether to use it, but how much and where to store your code. 9. Always use a 301 server side redirect – this was especially helpful when moving over to new domain – moving page by page. We moved over a few hundred pages to start and then once that went without a hitch, we pushed the rest over and saw no decrease in traffic, in fact we even picked up additional site traffic. 10.  Robots.txt – still can’t believe this is ignored by most dev teams, but an important component to include for sure. I presented this and more in a PowerPoint presentation to my technical teams and each team appeared to have gained a little more insight and a better understanding of those components that do matter.You might want to also present a flow chart of your overall SEO program, I personally like to begin with a top down approach, this might take the majority of the year to include, but your site side is just as important as your off site optimization.If you have any process techniques or how you best work with your technical team, I would love to hear it!  

 

Filed under: SEO Factors