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Search engine optimization for a large company or organization comes with challenges not typically encountered when doing SEO for small business websites. How do you get everyone on the same page, when SEO affects so many people and departments? This article will discuss some of the issues you should consider when performing SEO for a large client.

Eric Enge discussed these issues with Warren Lee, who manages SEO for Adobe’s web properties. The web software company gets 48 million visits a month to its own websites thanks to Lee’s efforts. In Lee’s opinion, knowing what the most common hurdles to SEO are before starting a project can help prevent problems before they occur. They can also help you plan a winning strategy.

The first of these four big challenges, as Lee sees it, is something he calls “cross functional alignment.” It stems from the fact that large organizations tend to separate their functional parts into silos: marketing, HR, production, IT, etc. The SEO team tends to get put in the same silo as either marketing or IT. In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing. The real problem is that these separate silos, while existing within the same large firm, often don’t talk to each other – and SEO, by its very nature, affects many silos beyond its own.

“Given that website, technical, and product marketing decisions all influence SEO performance, teams have an inherent challenge with being strategic and cross functional,” Lee notes. But it’s not just a matter of communicating with these other areas; they must actively work with the SEO, and “most stakeholders do not willingly (assuming they know how) incorporate search best practices into their daily work,” according to Lee.

To get over this hurdle, Lee recommends that SEO teams examine what areas of the organization their work is most likely to affect (and be affected by), and “build relationships with critical partners” within the company. He notes that within a large organization, these may include teams engaged in paid search, site search, social media, digital analysis, IT, web operations, web security, the legal department, product management, product marketing, editing, quality assurance, mobile technology, and remarketing and site testing.

The next challenge Lee discusses is maintaining focus on the critical initiatives. “The solution to finding a balanced level of service is developing a team culture where project priorities are driven by data results and supported by effective training, processes, and communication with stakeholders,” he explained. In short, figure out what data to collect, what numbers will tell you that your initiative has been successful, and what you need to do to get those numbers.

Make sure your team understands how to use your analytics tools and what you’re trying to achieve. Also make sure they’re motivated, and that they’re not losing sight of your goals. It’s easy in SEO to look too closely at the trees and miss seeing the forest. To help your team keep its focus where it belongs, Lee suggests “filtering projects based on the level of impact on the few essentials of SEO: site architecture, internal and external linking, and new or existing content.”

The third hurdle Lee discusses is getting buy-in. I don’t have to tell regular readers of SEO Chat that many companies see plain old SEO as relatively unimportant – and that seems to be especially true of large organizations. Lee notes that research by Rebecca Lieb at the Altimeter Group showed that “SEO is often a low priority and therefore doesn’t receive as many corporate resources as online video, social media, or mobile marketing initiatives.” So how do you get the buy-in you need to get the resources you need?

Lee recommends an essentially negative strategy, perhaps because executives are afraid of bad things happening on their watch. Such fear can provide excellent motivation. “Highlighting past failures or calling out future ones (if changes aren’t implemented) can be incredibly effective at getting buy-in. In particular, showing what competitors are doing that you’re not is a great catalyst,” Lee observes. When you achieve your SEO goals, be generous in sharing the credit for the achievement. “Never take credit for search wins alone, and be mindful to thank others for their support in the wins, and you will find that getting buy-in becomes significantly easier,” Lee explains.

The final hurdle in search engine optimization for large organizations that Lee discusses is balancing search team involvement. Once you get everyone on board with the idea that SEO affects many aspects of a large organization, and get the resources you need to carry out your vision, you need to tell all these people WHAT to do and HOW to do it. Many of them may never have heard of SEO before.

Lee suggests you hold training sessions to teach them what they need to know. Without such sessions, he notes, “the implications of not integrating SEO into business processes like content creation, information architecture, or social media linking won’t be fully understood.” He suggests that you customize the training sessions for specific teams, such as editorial, quality assurance, social media leads, and so forth.

Lee also mentions a number of topics you might cover at these sessions. These include: the importance of natural search engine traffic; the fact that SEO success can’t be achieved by the SEO team alone, but requires the help of everyone who deals with the company’s digital assets; and the importance of interacting with the SEO team before making any changes to the company’s website.

Hopefully, the next time you’re in the position of working on SEO for a large company, keeping these challenges in mind will help you to overcome some of the serious problems you might face. Good luck!

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Convincing visitors to share your blog posts on social media sites isn’t really hard. It’s more a matter of moving barriers out of their way and making it easy for them to share – like setting your dog’s food and water bowls at a comfortable height for him. So let’s take a look at what you can do to encourage readers of your blog to leave comments and share your entries on Facebook and other social media.

Angie Schottmuller identified 13 of the top barriers to on-site social media engagement, noting that some were more evident than others. I won’t have room to discuss them all here, but I will cover many of the ones guaranteed to pull a visitor up short. I’ll also talk about the ways you can fix these problems.

Let’s start with social sharing buttons. These are the buttons that make it easy for users to post a link to your item in their Facebook feed, Pinterest board, or what have you. The problem here is when you go to extremes, according to Schottmuller: offering your visitor either too few or too many options. She recommends putting two to four of the most active sharing buttons at the top of the post, and then including a full group of share links (up to six) at the very end. If you’re worried about leaving any options out, you can always set this last group up to expand and show more options. Ideally, though, you should limit the entire selection to the sites “that align with your social media goals,” according to Schottmuller.

If you’re trying to encourage visitors to leave comments on your articles, don’t force them to create a full-blown account! I can’t tell you how often I’ve run up against this wall myself. If I have to fill out some kind of long form, it’s enough to make me decide not to bother posting a comment. Don’t lose an opportunity for engagement from your readers. Schottmuller notes that getting their name, email, and message should be enough to let them post. She also recommends using OpenID and other social sign-on tools to avoid issues with forgotten passwords, which could stand in the way of on-going online engagement.

Now I’m going to mention something that might surprise veteran SEOs: meta descriptions. Yes, meta descriptions do not affect your rank in the search engines.   But I’ll tell you what they do accomplish: write a really good quality description under 150 characters, and you just might increase your click-through rate. Don’t think so? Then remember this: the meta description shows up with the link when your article is shared on social media sites. You’ve already convinced someone to share it; why not entice their friends to read it, too, so they can continue the conversation? (Who doesn’t want to encourage others to say cool things about them?)

Next, have you ever tried to surf the web on a mobile device? It’s gotten better over time, of course, but you’re still dealing with relatively large fingers on a relatively small screen. Don’t assume your visitors will all be at big, comfortable keyboards using huge mice. Make all of your share buttons a minimum of 44 by 44 pixels; that’s what Apple recommends, and their iPhone all but wrote the book on easy-to-use mobile web devices. Separate these buttons and other clickable actions with a reasonable margin so you don’t need tiny fingers to avoid misclicks.

The last item I’m going to discuss in this piece is your call to action. If you want your reader to comment on your article or share it with others, why not tell them? Or as Schottmuller puts it, “now that they’ve read the content, what should they do?” Limit your suggestions to one or two actions; you want to encourage your readers, not confuse them. Make the call to action the last thing your reader sees in your article, so they can do it immediately.

Check your blog for these issues, and fix them. Your readers will thank you with greater engagement and more shares. How have you successfully encouraged your readers to comment on your articles and spread them to their favorite social media sites? Share your tips and tricks in the comments!

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The ax started falling at Yahoo last week – and it wasn’t pretty. About 2,000 employees got pink slips. With the latest report from comScore, though, one might be forgiven for wondering if it was the correct 2,000.

First, let’s take a look at the layoffs. The firing of 2,000 employees more than decimated the company’s payroll of 14,000. Search Engine Land reported Yahoo’s confirmation of the layoffs, and that the beleaguered search engine “expects to realize approximately $375 million of annualized savings upon completion of all employee transitions.”

Kara Swisher, who seems to have both excellent sources and very sensitive antenna for which way the wind blows, expected the layoffs to hit hardest in the product division. But no division was immune. Yahoo’s local businesses, and its marketing and research divisions, would also feel the pain more deeply than other areas. The scariest part of all this, for those still working at Yahoo, is that this round of layoffs “is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg that will hit the storied Silicon Valley Internet giant in the months to come,” according to Swisher.

To add an element of irony to the mix, Swisher noted that “Yahoo will be ‘doubling down’ in some older and new arenas, so there would also be simultaneous hiring in the months ahead.” This week, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson revealed the company’s new structure, which may give us some idea as to where this growth may come from. The structure will take effect May 1, and features three primary divisions: Consumer, which includes Media, Connections and Commerce units; Regions, which serves Yahoo advertisers and brings in the company’s revenue; and Technology, which handles the infrastructure and platform.

While it’s not obvious from this brief description, Yahoo’s search department actually survived the purge. It falls under the Connections unit. To quote Thompson’s memo, “Connections will be led by Shashi Seth, and include consumer businesses that connect and inform our users including Search, Connections and Social properties such as Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, and more.” Thompson challenges this unit to “think well beyond how users search, communicate and share online today” and to “fundamentally re-imagin[e] how we design and deliver the next generation of these foundational Yahoo experiences.”

So the search department still exists at Yahoo, but one must wonder how much longer that will last. Search is mostly outsourced to Microsoft, thanks to a deal between the two companies a few years ago. And a recently released report by comScore on US search engine rankings is rather less than encouraging.

In this report, comScore revealed its monthly analysis of search engine standings in the US search marketplace. To no one’s surprise, Google led the marketplace, followed by Microsoft in a distant second place, Yahoo third, and Ask and AOL in fourth and fifth place respectively. The part that must have really hurt at Yahoo, however, was that it was the only one of the five search engines to see a drop in search queries in March. As Barry Schwartz noted, “Google, Bing, AOL and ask all saw at least a 5% increase in search queries, whereas Yahoo saw a decline of 5% in the number of search queries.”

It’s worth noting that mobile search queries were not included in this report, but even so, the news can’t have been received with pleasure at Yahoo. Not only was Yahoo the only search engine to see a decline from February to March; it was also the only one to see a year-over-year decline, when comparing March 2011 to March 2012. About the only remotely comforting bit of news in the report was that each engine’s share of the search market really hasn’t changed that much.

Whether the changes just instituted at Yahoo will bring about a better picture in the coming months remains to be seen. Like many people, I’ve been disappointed too often by what I’ve seen happening at Yahoo in recent years to hold out much hope. Then again, I can remember a time over a decade ago when I wrote Apple off. We’ll see if Yahoo can come up with a few good surprises.

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I’d never heard of Samantha Brick before last week, when her article for the Daily Mail in the UK went viral – as did its follow-up. Literally thousands of readers posted nasty comments and shared her article, while many journalists and bloggers shared their opinions from a variety of angles. Let’s take another look at what happened.

Just in case you haven’t read these pieces, here is Brick’s first article and her follow-up piece. It’s worth noting, of course, that Brick’s no beginning writer: her articles for the Daily Mail go back to mid-2009, and in them, she gives the impression of a longer professional history (as you might expect for almost anyone her age).

She’s written somewhat controversial articles before, but they never seemed to take off like this one. Indeed, in a piece for the Telegraph on the topic, Bryony Gordon wrote that “Samantha Brick’s contributions to British newspapers have gone unnoticed until this week.” What did Brick say?

In a nutshell, she said that she was beautiful – and what’s more, that beauty came with unasked-for attention and little favors from men, and hatred and jealousy from women. She talked about how these reactions had lost her friends and even kept her from getting promotions. She talks about what she has done to play her appearance down in some cases. In the follow-up article, in which she discusses the reactions she got, she says they just proved her point. Both articles included pictures of her, which provided ample fodder for those responding to the pieces – and many of them said nasty things about her appearance and what they perceived as her arrogance.

Whether or not you believe she’s all that beautiful, it’s clear that Brick hit some kind of nerve. As this is SEO Chat, I’m somewhat less interested in her looks and more interested in how she generated this kind of viral response. What nerve did she hit? And how can you locate a similar nerve to attract visitors to your website?

If you read some bloggers who wrote sympathetic pieces, you’ll think that Brick inspired the outcry by saying exactly the opposite of what we’re used to hearing women say. Gordon notes that “In a world where female self-loathing is perfectly normal – expected, even,” Brick’s other articles earned little notice. But then, “Brick wrote that she thinks she is beautiful and that other women are jealous of her beauty…The story here seemed to be something along the lines of: Woman admits she doesn’t detest herself, world wobbles on its axis!”

Certainly, saying the opposite of what readers would expect to hear is a great way to grab attention. And that’s certainly one element of what caused Brick’s article to go viral. Gordon suggested that Brick’s real sin isn’t that she’s beautiful, but that she dares to believe she’s beautiful, and come right out and say it. It makes Brick “come across as arrogant, but that is a crime men have been guilty of for years,” Gordon notes.

Indeed, a number of male writers parodied Brick’s article, with Tim Dowling’s subtle humor being one of the better examples. But I think Gordon and Dowling only saw part of the larger picture. The real reason Brick’s article garnered such a strong response is a little more “primal,” and you can adapt it to your business.

Next: The Language of Power
 

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It’s hard to come up with an idea to promote your site or business that really makes it stand out. Offering discounts is fine, but how memorable is it? Keep reading for some unusual (and very cool) ideas that you can use to promote your site.

1. Organize an “injustice” campaign. Find something in your niche that you think is “wrong” and start a campaign to stop it. Notice how I put things in quotes here.  You could do this with some kind of serious injustice (invisible children), or with something that might be viewed as funny/interesting. If you’re a programmer, you could start a campaign against code with crappy/no comments. If you’re an Android fan, you could start a campaign against iPhone. If you’re going to go with something funny, then it should be extremely relevant to your niche. 

2. Give a discount to people that tweet about you in the most unique, funny, and/or interesting ways. Consider going as far as giving people your thing for free if it’s good enough. Think about hijacking some other hash tag for this. Now, if you’re going to do that, it can’t be something heavily used, or your thing will simply be buried. Doing it with something that is used a little can gain extra traffic and notoriety.

3. Go to industry conferences with your camera and chronicle the event. Post to your blog and let the event organizers know about it. Often they’ll tell people that didn’t go, in an effort to expand awareness for next year’s event. This is also a great way to meet more people in your industry, if you do a lot of interviews as a part of this. Get their email addresses and let them know when the video is ready as well, so they can tell their people about it.

4. Find a paid product in your industry that you really like, and promote it … without getting anything back. Talk about it and how much you liked it and why, and do it more than once. Don’t tell them about it. Probably they’ll find it, and will think it’s cool, and link to you and send traffic your way on their own. The idea with this is to give first, without any real expectation of return. Marcus Sheridan, as an example, talked extensively about HubSpot for a long time before he was noticed by them in return. Now he’s got tons of clients, thanks to HubSpot having him speak at their events.

5. Start a webinar series – or better yet, start a Google+ Hangout series. With each webinar/hangout, teach people things and allow real time feedback and questions. This helps to establish you as an industry expert. Plus, some people on Google+ really like hangouts, and will join them just to see what’s going on. This can dramatically expand the number of people that know about you.

6. In fact, you could take that last item one step farther and partner with a business that is related to yours in your industry, but doesn’t directly compete against you. Together you could do a webinar/Hangout, and because of the additional promotion from what is now multiple companies, gain even more traction and get more notice throughout your industry.

7. Create awards for your industry, complete with badges for their website and actual trophies you will send them. Often, winners will talk about what they’ve won, and you’ll get links and traffic from that as well. Plus, you will be building a tremendous amount of goodwill with the people that won. This makes doing partnerships and the like easier.

8. Give away some part of your product for free or insanely cheap, then have other pieces that people have to purchase. Mobile apps do this all the time; it’s called “freemium.” Basically, give some stuff away for free, but have other things for which people have to pay.

9. In fact, look for places where some kind of tool or service would be of help to your industry, and give it away for free. Consider ways that you can then “bolt on” additions or improvements that people have to pay for.

10. Consider giving your best services or products to a top blogger or personality in your market for free, in exchange for them talking about what they thought to their people/readers. You can build up good will and gain a lot of notoriety quickly with just this one technique.

Next: More Unusual Site Promotion Ideas
 

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Yahoo’s new CEO, Scott Thompson, appears set to leave his mark on the troubled search company. Many in the media reported plans for massive layoffs at Yahoo starting the middle of this week, followed by restructuring next week.

Kara Swisher broke the story at AllThingsD, citing unnamed insider sources. Though Yahoo employs around 14,000 people, she noted that “thousands of employees” could be laid off. The layoffs are apparently the upshot of a series of meetings Thompson held with top management at the end of March.

What will Yahoo look like after the layoffs? Swisher described the goal as “a drastically slimmed-down organization with a focus on media, advertising and new but unclear ‘future’ initiatives.” To that end, the layoffs will mostly affect those employed in the product, research and marketing units of Yahoo.

Swisher also seemed to imply that Yahoo may not be keeping its ad technology or search business. She cited her sources as noting that “Thompson and others are still trying to figure our how to dispense with” these parts of the company, and that Yahoo’s CEO has been talking with both Microsoft and Google on this topic. About 2,500 employees work for these units; their fate remains uncertain.

So exactly what would the new Yahoo look like? Swisher’s sources said the image emerging includes at least three divisions: global media; communications and search businesses; and global and regional sales. A fourth, smaller organization, employing perhaps 50 people, may focus on future innovation.

Sarah Lacy reported that the ax would come down at Yahoo as early as April 4 for those in the United States, and a day later for those located in other parts of the world. She notes that Thompson seems to be targeting Yahoo’s international division, “particularly those parts of Asia that aren’t China and India.” She points to Yahoo’s footprint in Southeast Asia being bigger than both Google’s and AOL’s, and apparently believes that Thompson is undervaluing this asset.

Though Lacy has disagreed with much of what Thompson has done at Yahoo up to this point (which is strange, since he doesn’t seem to have done that much other than hold some hush-hush meetings), she believes the layoffs are not a bad idea. Yahoo “is clearly a company that has been way too bloated for a long time,” and managing it must be nothing short of a nightmare – as it “is a jumble of silos, and getting its managers to all swim down is nearly impossible.” So if one can’t get the separate departments to act in unison, perhaps large cuts will get rid of the problem.

To those of us who have watched Yahoo for many years, this seems to be simply the latest move in a long death spiral. Thompson is trying to right a sinking ship, and at this point, it’s questionable whether anything will prevent the company from going down.

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Last week, Google webspam guru Matt Cutts posted a short video that he described as a “public service announcement” to webmasters. In it, he asked them to stop blocking Googlebot from crawling JavaScript or CSS.

Cutts normally uses these short videos to answer questions he’s received. In this one, he acknowledged that many webmasters block Googlebot from crawling JavaScript or CSS by using robots.txt. He tried to allay concerns about Googlebot causing problems when crawling a site. “A of people block it because the think, ‘oh, this is going to be resources that I don’t want to have, you, the bandwidth [used up] or something,’” he admitted, then went on to say “but Googlebot is pretty smart about not crawling stuff too fast.”

Cutts also pointed out that some webmasters will unintentionally block Googlebot from crawling some of their JavaScript. He noted that “a lot of people will do things like check for Flash, but then they’re including some JavaScript, and they don’t realize including that JavaScript – the Javascript is blocked, and so we’re not able to crawl the site as effectively as we would like.”

So to those who have concerns about the ability of Googlebot to process JavaScript and CSS, Cutts insists that “Google is getting better at processing JavaScript. It’s getting better at things like looking at CSS to figure out what’s important on the page.”

Cutts emphasized that removing the blocks from robots.txt would help everyone: searchers, site owners, and Google. “So, if you do block Googlebot, I would ask, please take a little bit of time, go ahead and remove those blocks from the robots.txt so you can let Googlebot in, get a better idea of what’s going on with your site, get a better idea of what’s going on with your page, and then that just helps everybody…if we can find the best search results, we’ll be able to return them higher to users.”

He wrapped up his PSA by acknowledging that he’s asking for a change in behavior, but pointed out that the blocks were no longer necessary. “So thanks if you can take the chance,” he said. “I know it’s kind of a common idiom for people to just say, ‘oh I’m going to block JavaScript and CSS,’ but you don’t need to do that now. So please, in fact, actively let Googlebot crawl things like JavaScript and CSS if you can. Thanks.” You can view the full YouTube video.

Users at Webmaster World have responded with a certain amount of suspicion to this video. For example, realmaverick expressed concerns that Google might misinterpret something in his JavaScript or CSS files as being malicious, and wondered if the search engine had already been penalizing sites based on their JS content. Another forum member, lucy24, noted that blocked content was none of Google’s business. Making a comparison, Sgt Kickaxe wrote “Nothing personal G, I don’t let the oil change guy take a look at my valves either.” It looks like Google can’t do anything without igniting some kind of controversy.  

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