SearchFest 2011 Mini-Interview: Todd Nemet

Todd Nemet will be speaking about “Advanced On-Site SEO” at SearchFest 2011, which will take place on February 23rd at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

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

I left Google a little over a year ago to be the tech lead at Nine By Blue (www.ninebyblue.com) where I work with Vanessa Fox and Laura Lippay. Laura just joined Vanessa’s company last year, and it’s been great learning from and working with both of them.

During my six years at Google I worked in the AdWords sales engineering team, developing tools for sales and helping Google’s largest advertisers implement various Google technologies like the AdWords API, Google Analytics, YouTube brand channels, and Google Gadgets. Before that I worked in the Enterprise division, running the beta program for the Google Search Appliance and managing the support department.

I have also worked at Verity (now Autonomy) and Inktomi, so I’ve been working with search engines in one form or another — enterprise or Internet — since about 1994. At Inktomi I also worked on the proxy-cache called Traffic Server, which helped me get a thorough grounding in HTTP and how to scale large Internet applications.

Before that I earned a BS in EE from Purdue University, and I did some grad work at UC Berkeley where I was a TA for fun classes like Electromagnetism and Digital Signal Processes.

I have a website with a few tools that I put together at www.toddnemet.com that people attending SearchFest might find useful. (I put my effort into writing tools rather than blogging because I think we can all agree that the world doesn’t need another SEO blog. Also, writing code requires a level of rigor that writing opinions does not.)

2) How can an SEO best deal with a “sucky” CMS?

There are so many ways that a CMS can suck that it’s not possible to list every strategy for dealing with them. If the "official CMS" sucks beyond the point of use, then other departments will develop and use their own CMS that will each suck in their own special way, and eventually the whole site will be a jumbled mess of suck.

The best general way to deal with this is to do a standard gap analysis focusing on what the CMS is missing, which generally starts by doing a technical assessment of the site or sites produced by the CMS. After that it’s good to do a few interviews with marketing and dev to understand processes for how pages are written, translated, etc. From there it’s possible to list and prioritize the features it needs in order to become a tenable solution and detail the best practices to take advantage of the newly-fixed CMS.

Sometimes it’s a matter of the CMS not being implemented or used properly, which is relatively easy to fix. Sometimes you hear, "Oh we were going to rewrite the CMS from scratch anyway," which is a good opportunity to do some technical SEO training for the dev team to put in good features for SEO and enough flexibility to handle the future. Sometimes the only good solution is to nuke the current CMS and recommend an open sourced one based on the platform they run on.

3) What are some of the most common Enterprise-level SEO fails and how should they be dealt with?

The fundamental reason behind all SEO failure is a lack of clarity about what the business purpose of the website is.

I have noticed that companies that live and die by the web because it is the majority or entirety of their business have no problem quickly incorporating SEO advice into their site.

But companies that think of their website as a cost center and treat it like a catalog — or worse, a brochure — will fail no matter what their SEO strategy is because it won’t be aligned with the fundamental goals of their business.

This lack of clarity about fundamental business goals manifests itself in the multitude of fails that we are all too familiar with: crappy legacy systems, useless microsites, outsourcing to shady agencies, demented syndication strategies, and so on.

A second fundamental reason that is behind much SEO failure with large enterprises is the attitude that organic is just one independent marketing channel of many. This manifests itself in carefully thought out campaigns on radio, TV, and OOH that make no sense from an SEO standpoint. Vanessa Fox does a great series on Search Engine Land where she shows for the past few Super Bowls how companies spending millions of dollars on TV commercials don’t take basic SEO steps to capitalize on the resulting demand.