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MSN's SEO And Content Teams Standardize Efforts

Aligning content with search engine marketing and optimization has become one of Duane Forrester's top priorities. The senior program manager of SEO for MSN at Microsoft in the Americas says management wants to get more involved in the process, since having companies manage their content correctly during SEO can produce double-digit percentage growth for inbound traffic.

That means giving those involved access to the content systems, as well as knowing the correct keywords to target. "For me to run down the hallway and tell an editor, 'hey, you need to edit this H1 tag,'" doesn't do any good if the field doesn't exist or the editor doesn't have access to the system, he says.

Any change in the content management system at MSN can influence "tens of millions of pages" worldwide -- and what works in the United States might not work in the United Kingdom. The SEO team must work with the content management group, so everyone understands the best practices for optimizing the content.

MSN's content includes everything from video galleries to articles on health. The SEO team has tools to crawl MSN sites and rate them for optimization. Globally, five people lead the group, including Forrester in North America, three in the United Kingdom and another in Tokyo.

The SEO team in North America often gets tapped to optimize sites across Microsoft, so Forrester will push the strategy to stretch companywide. And while MSN doesn't support Bing, it does provide SEO guidance for some of the content pulled into the network.

"Videos will become a larger component of Bing," Forrester says.

The changes to the strategy mean templates for Web pages on all content must meet SEO compliance. It also means fundamental best practices are in place for title tags and meta-descriptions, and navigation links aren't buried in JavaScript.

The strategy aims to set standards for internal divisions and third-party companies that provide MSN Web content, so when Microsoft gets video, articles and rich media in Flash and Silverlight, it can use the content across its properties with little effort. "We have a finite number of resources to apply to producing the content," Forrester says. "Making sure the content coming in is optimized... makes it easier to do the maximum amount of work with a limited number of resources."

Each Microsoft division also has what Forrester calls an "SEO champ," an employee who "sits in the channel" and becomes the conduit between Forrester's team and the division for any conversations on SEO.

1 comment about "MSN's SEO And Content Teams Standardize Efforts ".
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  1. Douglas Cleek from Magnitude 9.6, November 21, 2009 at 8:08 a.m.

    Good article. I can confirm first-hand that getting content developers involved in the process and informing them of the SEO/keyword strategy can boost incoming traffic by leaps and bounds. Needless to say, observing site analytics and real-time competitive searching will also reveal opportunities for improving SEO.
    Content developers should be efficient with the utilization of the CMS which provides them the capability to optimize the content, thereby speeding up the entire process for making sure your content is relevant and timely.

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