Good Information about SEO.

When I hear SEO, I think snake-oil. The whole industry is tainted by the stink of pseudo-science. Go to the SEO conference in NY and you’ll see every Tom, Dick and Guido with their own special recipe of SEO that’s guaranteed to beat the competition. I call shenanigans on the whole industry.♦

There are SEO companies to hire, like SEOmoz, and others to avoid, like in almost every industry, there will be some shady people. Some have had great results and are highly respected. If you go with someone to do SEO, always check their portfolio and call their clients.

I still don’t get how people can ignore SEO in their sites. Everybody can get their foot in the door with some unique content. Those who complain that content ruins the look and feel of a site need to re-evaluate their design skills.

twitter.com/topherolson

SEO is very important, especially if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on PPC. Make sure you remember to have unique description meta tags that are relevant to your title and content.

SEO isn’t easy but it works, just using a couple SEO basics, I’ve taken the website for the company I work for from page 20 on google to #1 and #4 on two terms that have millions of searches. SEO helped alot it also helped that it seems many of our competition isn’t using SEO

It just goes to show that even the large companies with their million dollar SEO budgets can still fail badly at SEO.

[...] SEO At the Enterprise Level–A Major Flop (tags: seo webmarketing) [...]

This is a great post and the interview sheds a lot of light on SEO for businesses. I agree that SEO is huge, and even though it may seem daunting or like there is not really one right answer, that does not mean we shouldn’t pursue SEO for our companies or even that there aren’t certain fundamental keys that everyone could easily follow: repeat relevant and highly searched terms throughout your site content, don’t overwhelm your site with ads, include key terms in your page titles, etc, etc, etc.

I do, however, think that Mr. Spencer is writing SEM off too quickly (because it’s in his better interest do so). Of course if money is an issue (as it is with so many people and companies these days), getting clicks for your organic listings is a benefit because it’s free. Bulking up your SEO, however, is not free. Also, even if 85% of people click on organic ads (and that percentage is debatable), the conversion rate on those clicks is actually lower than the conversion rate for clicks on paid search ads, when the query is a term you are bidding on in your PPC campaigns. It’s amazing what being able to tailor the content of the results can do for your business, if you do a good job.

[...] February 5, 2009 at 8:33 pm · Filed under General SEO At the Enterprise Level–A Major Flop [...]

I’ve found smaller companies are more eager to leverage SEO and recognize it’s value.

And in my business – recruitment – it’s growing quite popular. Companies do recognize the fact that job seekers are using search engines (namely Google) more and more for job hunting (whether they do so passively or actively) and very few companies leverage SEO to attract people. It’s definitely a growing trend in HR / recruiting.

I spend most of my waking hours either working on an enterprise SEO program or pitching an SEO program to a Fortune 1000 company.

I’d say that, more or less, for every one example of a big company ignoring and/or failing at SEO, there’s another company that’s making huge strides in the right direction.

And remember that, like happiness, SEO is a direction not a destination!

spoken like a true snake-oil salesman

While you are calling shenanigan’s, your competitors who are using SEO are eating your lunch.

SEO is a leap of faith like any other marketing tactic. That said it’s probably more reliable than many other marketing tactics and can have an amazing ROI. The challenge with enterprise SEO is that for most companies it is often not part of a strategy. Usually it’s treated as just another tactic that needs to be bolted onto the hundreds of other priorities – and treated like snake oil.

My question is this: If you hire an SEO company — why do most of the SEO companies have very little traffic? Shouldn’t their traffic be high or is it that their SEO tactics only apply to OTHER websites?

I don’t understand why anyone would pay money for SEO. It’s so easy, it’s like falling off a log.

For example, I have no training or experience in SEO and all I did was follow a few tips that I found for free on the Internet. And now I show up #2 on Google (out of over 30 million sites!!!) when you search for “high tech marketing.” It was a near-brainless exercise that anyone could do in a few hours.

anyone want to buy the golden gate bridge?

@Warren Schirtzinger
Nice ranking, though does anybody care? Do you rank for anything competitive that gets real search volume?

Great info, thanks for posting on the front page of TechCrunch for those of us who don’t usually read TechCrunchIT. Its got me thinking about my own employer and how they are doing with SEO.

@Warren Schirtzinger:

Why would anyone pay someone else to wash their car? It’s so easy.

For example, I took a sponge and some soap, and next thing I knew my car was clean!

i love seo and that is why i blog about it .

PageRank is largely based on backlinks, and the SEO’s featured in this article just scored bigtime.

The definition of an SEO: someone who knows the real value of a link.

This is a great seo definition:
http://mixingofeverything.blogspot.com/2009/02/seo-engine-optimization-definition.html

Natural SEO is just keeping your content fresh with relevant links. That’s all

” The Maybelline site is all Flash and not friendly to spiders.”

You may want to check on that mate! Search engines can off course index flash content!

@Warren

No one is searching for the term “high tech marketing”. Start ranking for “vegas flights” and then we’ll talk.

Oh and Aaron Wall, correct me if I’m wrong, but no SEO value in these No follow links right.

So are there any SEO agencies that provide a money back guarantee?

[...] SEO at Enterprise level is a flop [...]

Haa why dont all doctors have aids??

Search for “SEO money back” in google

Interesting article even for the non tech literate!
Is SEO a cocktail of link building and on page optimisation at the end of the day. Btw if anyone knows how to get me in the first five for the search “Motivational Speaker” consider themselves a friend for life!!

Love is to Sex Like Good Writing is to SEO

Can you have good sex without love? no, sex offers no meaning when separated from its spirituality.

Can you have SEO without good writing? No, lasting SEO can’t be faked.

The way to great sex is to love like a saint, and the way to great SEO is to be in love with your audience and write like Hemingway.

And an enterprise that tries to buy its SEO is like a …

SEO looks like a bunch of tricks that needs to be changed or adjusted whenever Google or Yahoo or MSFT change their algorithm. Tricks that don’t last very long.
Content is the continuity for getting high scores in the search results.
We manged to get at Alexa rank #407,000 by just publishing content.
It is clear that a blog post will score higher in search results than normal web pages.

In these tough times, I do not know how an enterprise can ignore SEO. I have not had good results with SEM. Most people who click on our ads seem to bounce off pretty quickly. I have found SEM to be good for immediate traffic, but when I look at my cost per lead, its horrendous.

I have seen that most enterprise marketing teams focus on on-page SEO i.e. tweaking keyword densities on their websites. However, I found inbound link building to be extremely effective in attracting traffic and I found that it plays a major role in SEO ranking compared to on-page tweaking. Unfortunately, today link building is equated to link spamming. We wrote lots of educational content and built links to it. This created quality material and we posted the material in credible places. This strategy has helped us quite a bit. We have been using an internet marketing tool from Axonize, Inc. (axonize.com) to help us build quality inbound links.

I totally agree with this. SEO is about writing great content for the audience, refreshing it regularly.

@Warren Schirtzinger:

Google Trends does not even carry any data on “high tech marketing”. Your shooting blind.

If your nice to Aaron, maybe he’ll hook you up with a copy of his book

Can anyone clarify what Stephen means when he says,

“At Netconcepts, we created a proxy server to rewrite webpages to be more search engine friendly–the enterprise builds their site, then tells the search engine bots to look at our proxy. We clean up the URLs, the data, etc to make it SEO optomized, without huge internal IT projects. It allows sites like Cabela’s to completely outsource SEO.”

Sounds like cloaking, but since he’s talking about it in an interview with a major blog, I suppose its not. So what does he mean?

What he is probably doing is

1. Grabbing the content from the client server
2. Applying filters to the content to change page titles, rewrite URLs, meta data, and maybe even linking structure
3. Serving the content from a secondary server which the client points their registered domain name to.
4. Caching the content where appropriate and most likely proactively.

Well of course the page can be indexed, it’s a matter of what gets included. If all that is indexed on the page is a reference to an swf file, what good does that get you. Yes, Google announced last year that they can “read” flash now, but that’s still only text in flash files. If, like many do, the words in the flash file are part of an image, it doesn’t get read.

And indexable or able to read certainly doesn’t equal friendly.

This analysis is way too simplistic and was leading towards a result with it’s questions and shows that you didn’t reach out to enough of teh right people.

I’d encourage you to visit me after my speech in San Jose on Monday at UGCX to discuss.

[...] seo At the Enterprise Level%26ndash;A Major Flop When I hear seo, I think of brilliant quantitative guys shut-up in an apartment somewhere running A/B split tests and writing link-bait. Search … [...]

Not to take away from your achievement (which is great), but ranking high is relatively easy if you have the keyword (or part of it) in your domain name. You obviously can’t do that with all the keywords.

Dang, if I was an in-house SEO for a big company and had a multi-million dollar budget, I would divide up the budget, “donate” the money to all the local schools in the area for good “PR” (LOL, I made a funny one for all you SEOs out there), have all the schools thank us by mentioning it on the homepage of their websites (.edu – wink wink and I’ll provide the content to the school webmasters with the appropriate links (anchor text and all followed). Then I would have our marketing department write me up a press release for each school we “donated” to, spread then through the appropriate online channels and call it a day.

Great post Jeff. I feel that getting the IT, marketing and management team all on the same page is the best way to move SEO recommendations forward. Having someone within the organization that has a strong voice, who is committed to improving SEO in the enterprise is the best way to improve results. In most cases, there is a lack of communication between groups that delays or inhibits the SEO process. Education is really the only way to get over these road bumps.

stephen’s article seems to be a scare tactic to encourage folks to outsource seo. seo is a long term process and requires competent in-house talent to master. i suggest pluking someone out of another seo firm to maximize results. if you don’t have a budget for this, buy a book

I too have the same instinct. I think the site’s content should speak for itself and we shouldn’t spend our entire time making a turd look like an organic, dark chocolate brownie.

That being said, if you write or build a website you want people to see it, and you want it to appear pleasing and efficient to them.

You are on the money with your thoughts on SEO. Just another avenue for scammers and hucksters to display their wares (snake oil that is).

‘a proxy server to rewrite webpages’…..

and how you change internal links after that ?

Here’s why big companies can ignore SEO: they haven’t needed it. In small companies SEO is a make-or-break issue. It’s the lifeblood to traffic, revenues and viability. Its importance also explains why SEO integrated into every aspect of a small company, from development to marketing.

Many big companies started the search race with a high pagerank. Back in the days of the Yahoo directory, they were placed into the listings. They have brands that draw consumers directly to their sites. But Now that smaller companies have learned how to rank in search, big companies have more competition.

But then, big companies also tend to move more slowly. Recently I was talking with several people in a division of a large tech company which I won’t name. When I mentioned SEO, more than one said, “what’s that?” I had to explain the concept. And this division made web-based products. Shocking.

I think that the SEO industry today is a lot like the internet and email was back in 1998. An infant. There were masses of people that used angelfire to build a website (myself included) they sucked and looked like crap. (still do) the web was full of new things and crazy names. (now so even more i guess i.e. flickr tumblr etc.) but things have seemed to mature after the dot com bubble burst. I think that there will be some sort of SEO bubble that will burst in the near future and people like the SEO rapper and the 99 year old SEO expert will die off and only solid actual SEO companies and individuals will remain.

That’s because SEO is still unknown to many internet users.

Most people search “entertainment” , “shopping” , “obama” , “paris hilton” , “sports” etc…

And a website to have many visits it needs to have a lot of content, and SEO sites have less and it’s also focused on SEO which again is not common to all.

I can’t believe stephen is bragging about their work with cabella’s. Cabella’s SEO program is garbage. Have you seen their URLs? Those things are long as hell. Shouldn’t cabella’s be ranking for terms like Guns and Hiking Boots? How many people actually search for “Hunting Socks”? Moral of the story – stephen is full of s***.

Mr. Spencer get right to the point on the main reason why every company needs to optimize. It is amazing how many fortune 500 companies don’t rank in the top 10 even when you search for their brand name.

[...] you will want to read TechCrunch’s “SEO at the Enterprise Level-A Major Flop” here by Jeff Widman. SEO refers to tricks and methods to cause a particular Web document to appear at [...]

There’s nothing brilliant or quantitative about SEO experts. It’s all a stupid bullshit game with zero scientific component, since any change in your traffic pattern may, or may not, have anything to do with the SEO tweaks you did 6 releases ago.

[...] an interesting indictment of standard SEO practices as delivered by traditional SEO firms entitled SEO At the Enterprise Level–A Major Flop.  To be fair, it points out that the reason current approach by enterprises to incorporating SEO [...]

idiot you cannot be serious? Top SEO specialists are at the top because they understand the CONCEPT of SEO backwards.

Sure their may not be an absolute science to SEO but there is definitely a requirement for great understanding of how Search Engines work.

We have experienced clear benefits of SEO on multiple levels on our site. So I can only say that what you say is nonsense

I’ll chime in here too. Tom is right on the money. And indeed, Google has made great strides in extracting text from Flash files. However, Flash “documents” are nonetheless at a disadvantage in the search engines compared to their HTML counterparts because of Flash’s absence of semantic markup. Without the contextual cues of what is a heading vs. a subhead vs. body copy etc., spiders can’t accurately weight more heavily the more important text in the Flash file. In addition, many times what appears to be text in a Flash movie is actually art; it may have started as text but was converted to outlines then further manipulated graphically by the designer. The bottom line: although Flash can provide an engaging user and brand experience, it hampers SEO.

That’s very close Andy! There is a secondary server involved (a “reverse proxy” to be technically specific about it), but it’s behind the network level and no domain pointing (DNS changes) is required. The optimized version is actually served up by the main web server, just like any other page of the site – after the secondary server hands back the page in optimized form.

And Dave, that is correct that it is not cloaking. Cloaking – when the same URL produces different content depending on whether you’re a human or a spider – is definitely not a tactic I would condone. It’s outside the Google Guidelines and is high risk – not a good thing for anyone, let alone a major brand/enterprise, to play with!

Here’s another way to think of GravityStream: it’s a SaaS technology product that automatically generates search optimal landing pages then seamlessly integrates them into the brand website. You’d avoid duplicate content by disallowing the non-optimized version of the pages. It sidesteps having to do major invasive surgery to your CMS to fix URL structure, HTML templates, internal linking structure, etc. for SEO. That said, we work with clients on a consulting basis quite frequently to help them with those CMS overhauls.

[...] February 7, 2009 · No Comments Link: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/02/05/seo-at-the-enterprise-level-a-major-flop/ [...]

The long URLs aren’t the ones getting indexed. The optimized versions with short URLs (with no stop characters) are. You can see this is the case by searching Google for “site:www.cabelas.com”. As far as terms like “guns” and “hiking boots” – those are not terms they are targeting. They don’t sell guns. They sell gun racks, cases, cabinets, sights etc. (all of which they rank on page one for). And ammunition. And “hunting boots” (which they are on page one for) are a much better fit for their target demographic than “hiking boots”.

Very good article
Thanks!

The questions are the following.
1) What happens if a netconepts client stops working with them? What happens to those url’s? Who do they belong to and does the site lose SEO strength from stopping with them?
2) Does it build long lasting SEO success?
3) What about head keywords?

So much more but that’s enough for now.

The author is totally missing the point why enterprises doesn’t spend much time on SEO.

Simply because they have other priorities at hand. At this economic crisis, they would rather spend that money on business process consultants who can give them a 2 – 5 % savings on operations translating to hundreds of millions of dollars. Their primary concern is to put their focus on where it directly hits their bottomline.

SEO on the other hand, doesn’t look to have a direct impact on their revenue and it requires a whole lot of planning, expenses, etc. If an SEO company goes to an enterprise and tells them you spend 2 millions dollars money back guarantee in SEO and get an ROI within the next two months, then that would be a different story.

SEO is not a rocket science.
http://thedezine.com/tips-to-make-your-life-easier-when-it-comes-to-seo/

SEO is a long-term investment, and few companies understand the commitment and value involved, but in reality SEO is much cheaper than PPC or any other form of promotion used by brands.

[...] Jeff Widman, “SEO At the Enterprise Level–A Major Flop,” TechCrunch, February 5, 2009 Share and [...]

I can tell you that SEO and having top three (position) rankings can make or break some businesses. 95% of the Fortune 500 ignore SEO and it’s so foolish. One thing that can’t be ignored is that long term SEO and link building is something that can actually build value. You can’t re-sell your PPC advertising from a year ago. But if you spent $50k on SEO and link building a year ago (unless you’ve done something to damage your site’s SEO since then) that has value today. A generic domain name that is keyword rich (or gets type-in traffic) has value. Those last two things mentioned actually have value in the aftermarket. (and can be resold)

A lot of SEO is essentially VooDoo. It will always continue to be that way, but to ignore it is foolish. I think that PPC marketing combined with a good SEO strategy is the best course of action.

This discussion about enterprise SEO is interesting. Honestly, I agree that it should be easy to achieve, and that the impact when you do get it right is HUGE, but few enterprises or their subsidiaries really get it right. I’m impressed by the Microsoft subsidiary site http://www.digitalforumtv.com. It’s built entirely in Silverlight and the UE feels pretty seamless and it even supports a really cool video editing feature for uses created by Metaliq.

They created a video about some of the site’s features here: http://www.digitalforumtv.com/Nav_Community_840.aspx

Wow, great article and right on the money. Take it from someone that lives the battle with the IT department every day.

My company hired me on because of my SEO and SEM experience and expertise, and it still is a constant fight getting the IT department to implement my recommendations.

A few of your statements really hit home – “There’s also an internal disconnect because SEO crosses IT and marketing. Example: changing from horrible URL’s–super long, no keywords in the URL–to cleaner, shorter URLs….”

“Part of the problem lies in that the Fortune 500 enterprises rely on their ad agencies for the “interactive” stuff but the agencies don’t know how to integrate SEO requirements with branding”

“websites are seldom built with SEO in mind; developers/programmers didn’t know what they didn’t know…”

Regarding ad agencies, my experience is that for the most part they are clueless about SEO, paid search advertising, and SEM. They may attempt to hire talent for these, but they have no idea how to measure the candidates credibility since they don’t know what it is they are actually talking about.

And regarding Milo’s comment – “SEO on the other hand, doesn’t look to have a direct impact on their revenue and it requires a whole lot of planning, expenses, etc.” The reason for this is that they (the fortune 500) do not have a clue as to SEO and its potential. It once again goes back to who they are dealing with regarding SEO. Anyone experienced in the field could and would give them an ROI analysis.

aldigital

Good questions!

1) If it’s consulting we’re doing for them, we’re usually helping create or strengthen an in-house team of SEO experts. Our philosophy is to teach our clients how to fish rather than do all the fishing for them. That way they can stand on their own two feet after our engagement is over. If it’s GravityStream we’re doing for them, the client controls the URLs because they are on their own site (on the www subdomain of their domain). Which means they have the ability to set up permanent 301 redirects on all the GravityStream URLs to the corresponding native-site product and category URLs (as defined by their CMS). They would need to “bake in” the SEO improvements into their CMS (the URLs, internal linking structure etc.) if they don’t want to maintain rankings – no small task if it’s an unwieldy CMS. We are quite open; we don’t hide anything in terms of what improvements we’ve made through the GravityStream proxy. You can simply compare the two HTML documents to see all the improvements.

2) GravityStream does build lasting SEO success in two ways. One way is that it helps guide your own CMS improvements, since clients are free to replicate our SEO infrastructure improvements and bake them into their CMS. Indeed we’ve had clients use GravityStream just a “bridge” solution until their major site redesign project was complete (which, shockingly, can take 2 years for some companies!). Second way is to look at GravityStream as your outsourced natural search marketing channel, ongoing. We, as their SEO agency, provide SEO guidance but with a big difference: we can actually affect change, even if it’s a terribly complex and convoluted CMS. Where other agencies deliver documents and spreadsheets, we can go beyond that (still providing these sorts of deliverables), but with the ability to implement the advice. We conduct tests, measure the results, and iterate over and over again – thus continually optimizing their SEO performance. Having a nimble enough CMS and sufficient amount of expert internal resource to pull this off is usually a tall order for an enterprise.

3) Head keywords are best addressed at the secondary level in your site tree (or on the home page of course). If the page is one click away from your home page, it has the best chance of ranking from a PageRank importance standpoint. By optimizing secondary level pages (through GravityStream, or through native site changes) to “sing” to the search engines for these various head terms, you improve your chances of ranking for these terms. That said, I’m a huge fan of the Long Tail of natural search. There is an incredible amount of opportunity/revenue that can be mined from a Long Tail SEO strategy, rivaling the value derived from the head terms. We wrote a research report on the topic: http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/ChasingTheLongTail.pdf

WOW! Well researched post about SEO but you are only mentioning big and expensive SEO companies yet there are cheap ones, charging a small monthly fee.

http://www.youtechno.info/2009/01/service-upgrade-better-seo-for-your.html

Stephan is spot on -

We deal with Fortune 1000 companies and the search agencies that serve them – and often see that the senior level execs have a great desire to invest in SEO, but get caught up on two main issues: scale and ROI.

We recently did a study on just how closely these companies tie their natural and paid search strategies – this might be useful for anyone out there banging the drum internally about the importance of investing in search.

Here’s the link:
http://www.conductor.com/research/q32008/natural-search-trends-of-fortune-500

Seth Dotterer
Conductor, Inc.

Everyone needs to harness the power of SEO, it will give you so much more traffic and visibility. It is also a good practice because it then forces you to hit certain keywords and possibly improve your writing.

It is sad that most of these major companies have no SEO whatsoever and complain that no one uses their site or knows who they are. My small start up probably has more SEO than most of these major companies, and we work hard at it. I think that is one of the many advantage start-ups have over these massive companies.

SEO is relevant for each website. Whether enterprise level or not. Bigger sites manage to get themselves listed amongst the top 2 or 3 just because of the links and popularity.

[...] e impresa Interessante articolo su Techcrunch, in un momento in cui si è un po’ smesso di parlare di SEO. Condivido la tesi secondo la [...]

Some may call it snake oil, and be careful who you buy from, but the fact remains that it is part of a any good website strategy. You are going to invest in it, so why not do it properly. Nothing beats quality content in the long run, but SEO can give you a jump start.

Excellent post and I totally agree. If you can talk the talk you better be able to walk the walk.

-AS

[...] Link: SEO at the Enterprise Level a Major Flop [...]

[...] (http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/02/05/seo-at-the-enterprise-level-a-major-flop/) [...]

Another reason it’s hard for big companies to initiate SEO initiatives is that there are no tangible results. When are you done with SEO? A consultant will tell you never. That’s why we created SearchPresence (www.searchpresence.net) to track your rank in search for each keyword you target. The service is free for now while we are testing.

An seo company gives small to medium enterprises a chance against the corporate companies, who can spend millions on their advertising, unlike small companies who cannot afford television advertising, and ppc is not cost effective.

i am working from my bedroom right now, only kidding, ha ha

SEM shouldn’t be a long-term investment.

SEO maybe cheaper than PPC? Oh really? ROI is higher on PPC, you can measure it easier.
PPC is a science, and not a long-term investment.

I’ve been doing some research while working at an economical SEO firm. This advice might not be what you were expecting. Search engine optimization will give your website exposure. But, at the end of the day, your website needs to provide visitors with some sort of useful information. Think of it this way. For traffic and rankings to stick, your website needs good, relevant content.
Introduction to SEO guideline that an economical SEO firm can follow. It was written by google, and it’s really good.

I agree that an SEO should be heavily involved in the development and programming of the site. Our SEO duals as both an optimizer and developer, it saves time and a huge headache

[...] Search Engine Optimization SEO At the Enterprise Level–A Major Flop [...]

its an important aspect……! Seo is something which should not be ignored.!

SEO constantly is changing and just when you think you have it fugured out…..good ole’ Google changes. Beware of anybody besides Matts Cutts that guarantees anything with Google! LOL!

I want to add a follow up statement about the value of enterprise SEO.

This article is not new, and I suspect that nobody lifted a finger today relating to this particular piece in order to drive me here. In fact, I really doubt the notion of somebody at Tech Crunch making feverish daily efforts to rewrite this article and further optimize it. It was well done at time of publishing, and it still serves the intended purpose.

This article was at the top of a search that I performed to find out why I am receiving traffic about Home Depot on my blog. I thought there may be some news story or something else I had missed. Sure, you can say that I do not bring a huge value to the table for Tech Crunch, but the point is that the cumulative result of great content adds up and continues to drive branding long after the initial pain of producing each piece is over.

Nice job, Jeff!

Enterprise SEO is still far too undervalued. Just look at the amount of blue-chip website out there that are poorly optimised. A few companies are slowly cottoning on that the web is not just the cheapest for of marketing, but also a very measurable way to acquire/ attract customers. Other have been burned using a dodgy agency. Lesson learned get you in-house SEO budget and have them sit between IT and Marketing, job done!