Enterprise SEO Blog

Semantic relevance, links, and uniqueness are three big enablers of high performance in the search that are definitely addressable by the enterprise.

The first two get the most attention because there are obvious techniques to address them, using copywriters and link builders. Neither is usually implemented as an automated task (but watch for my coming post on automated content) - both require significant man hours to gain traction at the highest levels.

And once you know your keyword universe, and understand the organizational strategy, basic search compliance - ensuring uniqueness across all title tags, description meta tags, & filenames can be enforced by automation. In fact, "enforced" can be replaced by "enabled" using the new techiques we're implementing now by default.

By including the unique data id for each url, you can be very permissive in allowing user defined title tags, description meta tags, and filenames, while still being able to guarantee uniqueness. You'll note that in the blog in re1y.com that all title tags now carry a numerical - it's associated with the blog post, so whatever title tag the blogger chooses, even if someone else already used that title, will be unique by virtue of the unique blog_id.

It's really too easy. Just automate the unique id into the tags or whatever you need to be unique. Now you may ask why you would want to have numbers in your tags and filenames. But if you manage a huge site with hundreds of contributors posting content from all corners of the globe, you don't want to be restricting their ability to choose titles because someone might have already used it. Flagging dupes wastes time. So having a number appear in your nomenclature is a very small consequence to pay for the peace of mind that guaranteed uniqueness brings.

The title tag for this page chosen by me is, "Automating Compliance Into The Enterprise SEO" and to that the system appends " | 16 : re1y.com". The "16" is the unique blog_id. This ensures that even if someone else chose my same title, the piece the system appends includes a different blog_id, and therefore the full title tag would be unique.

This idea rocks! A no brainer for dummies. Removes the need to check for redundancy, and the only downside is that I wish I thought of this.

btw, what are you doing at SMX? You should know better than to mingle with the religious masses on their annual pilgrimage. Last time I peeked in to SMX, I got stressed out by the pro-Google cheerleading and the overall wannabee mentality.

I didn't go. Did a phone conference with a client team from Denver who happened to be attending and one of the seo agency heads on the call made that comment to me.

You should add this very important anecdote:

When this concept was introduced to a site we migrated to our compliant cms (previously hosted within the Findlaw cms, where the title tags were mostly identical) the site came in at the top of the search for almost all important targets as soon as it was re-indexed,without having to change the tags. It was the unique numbers that enabled this. Imagine all the work that saved!