» Google Site Search

» Hiring In-house SEOs and SEO Agencies

» Search day at eTail 2008 in Palm Springs

Posted by:  Laura Dansbury, Global Hp.com On-site Search Program Manager

Tanya, Vicqui Chan from the HHO store, and I recently attended the first day of eTail 2008 together. We presented the afternoon panel discussion on the 3 pillars of Search: SEO, Paid Search, and On-site Search. It was a great experience for all of us. We are all on different teams. And we would not normally attend a conference together even if we were for cost-savings reasons. But I think the best learning experiences at conferences come from the hallway conversations with peers and coworkers between presentations. We tend to think it is wasteful to send more than one person to an event per team. But I think it is wasteful to ignore the insights and inspirations that occur when people facing the same challenges step away from the office and try to see the bigger picture at the same time! It also ignores the benefits of teambuilding and opportunities to discover new resources.

» Landing Pages - SEO vs SEM?

» Google Sitelinks-Why Won’t Google Let Us Designate Sitelinks for Our Domains?

Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Program Manager, HP.com

Has anyone else tried using the Google Sitelinks feature in Google Webmaster Tools? I love the idea of it and as soon as I heard about it of course I ran out and submitted my requested edits to update the HP.com sitelinks to what we feel would be a better customer experience – not just for HP customers but for Google customers as well. At HP, we know what portions of our web site are the most popular and what make the most sense to provide in a consolidated search result for someone looking for HP on the web so I was eager to give Google my input. Unfortunately they only wanted to hear half of what I had to say.

» Yahoo!'s Dynamic URL Rewrite

» PubCon 2007 in Las Vegas

I’m finally getting around to blog about my experience at PubCon – catching up after nearly a week out of the office is rough! But now that I have a moment to reflect (and I’ve had some time to recover from several days in Vegas!) I’m ready to share my experience.

» Why I’m planning to attend PubCon instead of SES Chicago in December

As most of you search geeks know, SES Chicago and WebMaster World’s PubCon are occurring at the same time this year – the first week of December. A lot of us on the In-House Committee of SEMPO were conversing about who was going to which conference and why. I’ve decided to go to PubCon over SES… 

» Google’s New “Set Geographic Target” Tool – Close but Not Quite…

I have to admit, when I got the notice from Vanessa Fox (previous Google Webmaster Tools product manager) about the ability to tell Google my preferred geographic location, I was ecstatic! This has been a challenge I’ve been trying to address for some time both directly (to the extent I can get any Google facetime) and indirectly through blog posts about International Web Content and Search Engines and pestering of Google personnel. Unfortunately the recent addition of the “Set geographic target” feature in the Webmaster Tools doesn’t quite work for many global web sites. 

» SEMPO Launches In-House Salary Survey for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Optimization (SEO) Professionals

Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Manager, HP.com

Many companies are considering bringing search marketing in house, whether it be to manage strategy and vendors or managinng the campaigns in their entirety.  One factor in making this decision is what to pay different levels of SEO and SEM search marketing professionals to ensure you get the best candidate.  Since SEO and SEM are relatively new professions, it's a little more challenging to understand the market value of these professionals.

» Bringing Search Marketing In House

Posted by Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Manager, HP.com

Search Marketing – should you bring it in house or should you outsource it? If you do bring it in house, what’s the best way to go about it? Do you train or hire experienced search marketers? The latter certainly aren’t easy to come by and even if you do there’s no guarantee they’ll stick around given the industry is short in these resources right now.

This is always a topic of discussion at the search conferences and within blogs and articles across the web.

» Universal Search and Ask3D – What Blended Search Models Mean to Marketers

» Setting SEO Expectations

Posted by Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Program Manager, HP.com

If you’re an in-house SEO you probably get this same question all the time. What kind of ROI can we expect from SEO? Actually that’s an easier question because I can at least say with confidence that SEO overall will have a positive ROI. What makes it harder is when I want to employ a certain best practice as part of the grander SEO strategy and I’m asked to justify the ROI for that specific tactic. Take, for example, redirects. It’s virtually impossible to tack an ROI on to making a blanket change of all redirects from 302s to 301s. Or how about developing an on-site site map, or one for submission to the engines or even – what should be the easiest to nail - optimization of a single page for a single keyword?

» Integrating SEO and Pay-Per-Click Search Marketing - Interview with Ryan Drey

» What makes a great in-house SEO blog?

» Integrating SEO and On-site Search - Interview with Laura Dansbury

Per my blog last week, this week I’m interviewing Laura Dansbury who manages HP.com’s on-site search.  I’ll go ahead and let her introduce herself.

» Farewell to Vanessa Fox, Google Webmaster Central Product Manager

Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, SEO Program Manager HP.com

If you’ve been doing SEO for a while (or have been following my SEO blog at all), you’re probably well aware of who Vanessa Fox is. For those of you not aware, she was the Product Manager for Google’s Webmaster Central. Webmaster Central is a great tool for site managers or web masters to use to ensure the most thorough crawl of their sites and get answers to the questions they have specific to optimization of their web sites for Google organic search results.

» SMX Advanced

My thoughts on the newest Search Marketing Conference, SMX Advanced by Danny Sullivan

Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, SEO Program Manager HP.com 

I’m writing this blog while sitting in the Penalty Box Summit at SMX in Seattle – not because I have anything to say about penalties or spam but because I have some things to say about the SMX Conference and this particular track (the only organic option) isn’t all that relevant to me or HP.  Probably the most interesting take-away from this session to me is that Google took some feedback yesterday and beefed up the Google Webmaster Help Center.

» Social Media Optimization and Social Bookmarking Tools

Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Program Manager

You can’t browse the web these days without seeing variations of social bookmarking and tagging widgets – especially when it comes to blogs.  I’ve wondered by blogs seem to be more bookmark-worthy than other web pages but am realizing that such encouraged bookmarking on blogs might be based on the desire of bloggers to encourage links and readership more so than demand by users for such ease of bookmarking on blogs versus the usual web sites.  I personally use a social bookmarking page (Del.icio.us – not because I researched and think it’s the best but rather because I just used it one day and it stuck) for those sites I want to bookmark for access later and am realizing that in many cases the pages I bookmark aren’t blogs but just web sites that offer information, tools, resources etc. that I frequent or may want to return to later. 

» HP and In-House SEO

Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, SEO Program Manager HP.com

Part of what I love about conferences is meeting new In-House SEOs because we often have a lot in common when it comes to challenges with implementing SEO for a large, very complex, multi-national web site.

» Tracking URLs indexed by Google, Yahoo! and MSN search engines – the proliferation of duplicate content.

Like many other enterprise companies, HP uses a fairly common tracking parameter across the site and URLs including these tracking codes have historically been indexed by Google, Yahoo! and MSN.  We've seen several of our pages with this tracking string on the URL get indexed and served in results for popular queries.  Within the last two weeks, however, it seems Google has figured out some of these tracking URLs and cleaned them out of their index.  We're still ranking similarly for the pages we’ve been monitoring but the tracking URL is no longer showing in the search results.

» Search Engine Strategies – SES NY Day 2

Today I attended 3 of the 4 sessions available on the advanced organic track at the Search Engine Strategies conference.  The one I missed was SEO through Blogs and Feeds because room filled up so fast that I literally couldn’t get in the door.  It seems like most of the sessions I’ve been in have been standing room only.  Are companies starting to take SEO more seriously?    

» Search Engine Strategies - SES NY Day 1

» International web content and search engines

Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Program Manager HP

In July, 2006 Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz entered a post in his blog about a topic I struggle with frequently in my position at HP - how and why search engines should handle international content.  Because I work for a global enterprise company managing SEO, I am faced with the challenge of the way search engines handle HP’s international content.