You may be familiar with Daft Punk’s “Work it Hard, Make it Better”. Any professional faced with endless a site that has volumes of content can connect with the lyrics:
“More than ever, Hour after hour, Our work is, Never over.”
As the founder of Blind Five Year Old, AJ Kohn combines a deep knowledge of search with a passionate interest in product strategy. Kohn broke his Engage PDX presentation into three key areas that will help manage and scale SEO. To be successful focus on the following: Crawl, Index, and Rank. Then apply a framework.
Crawl
When it comes to crawl, the Google Crawl team can be stingy. They have limited resources so ensure they can crawl your site efficiently and as completely as possible.
Tips for improving crawl:
- Google has zero tolerance for 500s. Clear them up to improve the crawl process.
- 404s are junk food. Have too many internal 404s? Google will be done with you. Clear them up. Fix 404s and traffic goes up.
- Kohn notes “you are what GoogleBot eats.” His advice is to nourish it well and feed it healthy “everyday food”, not junk-laden “sometimes food”. Track the crawling by page type. Not all pages are the same.
- Sometimes Google crawls the wrong way, so he suggested to the audience we use a robots.txt tool to help direct Google Crawl to the pages we want to make sure are included in the crawl. This will help spend your crawl karma points with Google.
Optimize
Index optimization – Optimize and organize site maps using an XML map. Take time to ensure the site’s crawl organization mirrors the sitemap organization. Rank Rank is not about any one particular term (although it can be hard to convince some clients of this!). It’s best to think of rank in terms of It’s about indices.” Use stock indices as an example. Understand the user and how they search. It’s imperative to get the syntax right and create an index that will materially impact the business. But how do we impact rank? Simple one word answer– Titles. While you can’t hand-optimize millions of pages, we can use smart templates to create a logic tree for creating titles. Using logic and variables will create a strong path to success.
To close his presentation, Kohn provided this final note for all of us whose attention span is short:
TL;DR – Kohn left the audience with a succinct summary of his presentation – Measure, crawl, index, and rank by query class!
As Director of Marketing at American College of Healthcare Sciences, Rachel oversees the development and delivery of integrated marketing strategy.