SearchFest 2009 Interview: Derrick Wheeler

Derrick will be speaking about “SEO” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I currently live in Bend, OR and work remotely for Microsoft as the Senior SEO Architect for Microsoft.com. I’ve been involved in Internet marketing and SEO since late 1996 when I worked for Internet marketing pioneer John Audette, founder of Multimedia Marketing Group (MMG). MMG was later acquired and renamed to Outrider. My role with Microsoft involves SEO evangelism, enablement, education, and evolution… the four Es of in-house SEO. Our small team influences the success of SEO for Microsoft.com at three levels:

• Site-wide SEO Initiatives
• Site-specific SEO Programs
• Page-level SEO Guidance

I’ve worked at many different marketing agencies mostly through acquisitions of the small Internet marketing start-ups I worked at. I decided to go the in-house SEO route with Microsoft.com to gain experience in the full spectrum of SEO, among other reasons.

For fun and to energize myself after a day of SEO-related work I go for what I call “power thinking walks” and listen to music. I have two kids, two dogs, two cats, and one wife. J A random fact about me is that I regularly change my “look.”

My recent looks include:

• Corporate
• Geek
• Bad-ass
• Western
• Rockin
• Family man

You can see a few of them on my blog at www.derrickwheeler.com. You won’t find any blog posts on my site. I created it to push down other people ranking for my name specifically a double-murderer also named Derrick Wheeler. It’s my lame, half-assed attempt at personal reputation management.

2) What preventative steps can an organization take to impose order and discipline on a large, multi-faceted website?

Preventing SEO barriers during the initial design and development phases of a website is the key to scalable, cost-efficient SEO success. In general, websites need to include a seasoned SEO specialist during the website planning, design, development, launch, and ongoing publishing process. This person should be involved in all aspects of the website including selection of a content management system and shopping cart, influencing the information architecture and technical structure of the website, selecting a web analytics solution, ensuring copywriters include the appropriate words and phrases into the copy, plus much more.

For large websites like Microsoft.com (we have over 1.2 billion URLs) one person cannot keep up with all of the new websites being launched and pages being published every day. Our approach involves educating marketers, web developers, copywriters, and anyone else who touches the website. This includes both in-house and agency teams. Our team takes on the challenge of fixing large-scale, site-wide issues (like severe duplicate content) that impact the success of every website on Microsoft.com. However, we only provide guidance on process, strategies, and tactics for site-specific and page-level optimization projects. We work hard to get individual websites like Windows and the MSN Toolbar Download to engage in a proactive SEO process, including link development work. J

3) What “search engine spider” challenges do you deal with on your massive websites that you oversee?

As part of our site-wide SEO strategy we identified what we refer to as the Top Five Site-wide SEO Barriers:

• Duplicate and undesirable pages
• Overuse of redirects
• Improper error handling
• Low quality titles and metas
• Structure of international websites

The first three barriers are focused on URL reduction and crawler efficiency. We literally generate hundreds of millions of duplicate and low quality pages that search engines have to churn through to find our high quality pages. Our goal is to actually reduce the number of pages that search engines discover on our website mostly by blocking major sections of our site from being crawled using the robots.txt file. Some sections of the site don’t serve 404 responses for legacy pages. When this is the case, search engines crawl and index error pages that provide no value to searchers. These error pages get in the way of good pages from being discovered. Our website is completely decentralized which means that individual websites make their own decision on CMS systems, website functionality, how to handle errors, the type of redirects they use, among other decisions. Finding these occurrences and engaging with the website owners to get them resolved is a big emphasis for us. In addition encouraging best practices in these areas through education and evangelism is critical for us.