Simon Heseltine
By Allan Maurer
WASHINGTON, DC – AOL has an enormous amount of content posting daily, including the Huffington Post, and it wants as many hits on each story as possible. The man in charge of AOL’s search engine optimization efforts, Simon Heseltine, says one key is adaptability. “Working in SEO is a constant education,” he says.
“You have to keep your finger on everything all the time. Google changes its (SEO) algorithm daily. Some changes are minor, some very noticeable. But change is inevitable and it can change very quickly.”
People figure out how the algorithm is ranking stories and take advantage of it, resulting in once but no longer successful tactics such as keyword stuffing. Google not only changes the algorithm daily, tweaking it, the company also runs Panda from time to time. The initial run knocked out a lot of content farms relying on SEO tricks instead of high quality content.
Heseltine, a director of search at a DC agency prior to joining AOL, writes a regular column for SearchEngineWatch.com on a variety of topics within the marketing industry, and has previously written for other industry sites, such as SearchEngineLand.com (for their in-house marketing column). Simon teaches SEO at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. as part of their Digital Media Management program.
Will discuss how social affects SEO at Digital East
He is among dozens of Internet, digital media, social media, and marketing experts who are participating in Tech Media’s Digital East conference at Tysons Corner, VA, Sept. 28-29. He will discuss the effects of social media on AOL’s SEO efforts at the event.
We asked him to share four quick SEO tips with us.
Four SEO tips
Make sure the search engines can crawl your site
First, he says, “Make sure your site is crawlable (by search engine spiders). It’s amazing how many sites the engines can’t actually crawl because of a mistake with the site’s architecture or robo settings preventing the engines from crawling it.” This is no joke.
WordPress, the blogging system bringing you the TechJournal and tens of thousands of other blogs online, has a privacy setting that has to be checked to allow search engines. When we shifted from a different content management system to WordPress, it was not turned on immediately and of course led to a serious loss of traffic.
“When people move from a staging site to production, a lot of people forget to move the site to public so the engines can crawl it,” Heseltine says.
Find the right key words
Second: “Make sure you type in the right key words. Find out what people are looking for that is relevant to your story and make sure that’s what you target.”
Use key words
Third: “Make sure you use those key words in the headline and the content.
Link to yourself -
And fourth, “Make sure you link to yourself.” By that he means link to your site’s previous content to “spread readers around your site.” There are software products that will help do that. It is otherwise a time-consuming to do by hand. We have noticed that we get hits on that past content when we link to it in newer stories, however, so it does work.
Heseltine doesn’t stop there. “This is important,” he adds. “Write for readers, not for search engines.”
Regarding social media and SEO, which he will discuss more fully at Digital East, Heseltine says, “Even if you are not going to use a particular social network now, reserve your name on them. You don’t want spoofing (where a third party grabs the name and posts using it).
He also offers a warning: “If anyone out there is actually looking for an SEO company and you see a “guarantee” they can get you into the top five or ten results, run, don’t walk to the nearest exit. With all the changes the engines make, no one can guarantee to get you in the top five or ten.”
He didn’t say this, but even if they can, if the company uses so-called “black hat SEO” tactics, they’ll eventually get caught and your company’s Internet rankings may suffer accordingly – which is what happened to retail giant JC Penney.
