Dan Cohen's SEO at Scale presentation from A4UExpo, London October 13th 2009.

1. SEO at MSN Dan Cohen Global SEO Engineering Lead dan.cohen@microsoft.com | http://dancohen.info/

2. SEO at scale MSN covers 47 countries, 21 languages, 465Mil Users, Hotmail and Messenger Selling SEO: Prioritization, Proof, Progress Search marketing mix: PPC vs. SEO? Automation: crawler + analysis engine Engagement and Education Crawlers are users too

3. Relevance  User vs. Machine

4. SEO Workflow Engineering Editorial

5. Crawlability: Server Optimization HTTP Compression Having a large website and millions of pages or URLs means a crawler takes a long time to crawl and index your entire site XML Sitemaps and proper link strategy aren’t always enough HTTP Compression works like a .zip file Reduces download time for users and crawlers Conditional GET Do your pages change often? Why waste time having crawlers re-spider your site? Tell browsers and crawlers that your pages haven’t changed Improves index coverage quickly

6. IIS 7.0 SEO Toolkit

8. Full and deep SEO analysis

9. Rich dashboard and Query Builder

10. Detailed path-mapping analysis

11. IISBot – a fully-featured crawler engine

12. Full politeness features: analysis boundaries, number of URLs, max Kbs per URL

13. Support for Sitemaps, Robots.txt and “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”

14. Robots Exclusion

15. Full graphical user interface, support for filtering, sorting and grouping

16. Control sitemap locations and “disallow” by path, URL, parameters

17. “Physical” or “logical” view of your website

18. Sitemaps

19. Full control over sitemaps and sitemap index files

20. Easy-to-use interface

21. Tests for broken linkshttp://www.iis.net/extensions/SEOToolkit

22. IIS SEO Toolkit http://www.iis.net/extensions/SEOToolkit

23. Case Study SEO for MSN Video

24. Case Study: MSN Video http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb Flash Video in Flash Flash and AJAX AJAX

25. Case Study: MSN Video http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb

26. Case Study: MSN Video http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb

27. Case Study: MSN Video Real URLs – One page per video http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-gb&vid=b098ff42-994c-4ebd-8741-1c34737318b7&playlist=search:q:plane:mk:en-gb:sf:ActiveStartDate:vs:1:cs:ENGB_Stupid%20Videos&tab=s1204718424896&from=video_module ...becomes http://uk.video.msn.com/videos/woman-in-airport-strop/ Build links to the Video pages Empower users to share via Social Media and blogging with a single click Achieve scale by using the inline player on MSN content pages Show related videos Make the pages Crawlable Get rid of the AJAX Correct down-level experience Build topic relevance Expose user generated content such as ratings, comments, submitted videos Display relevant content from around the network in an automated fashion Full index coverage Geo-target individual countries’ Video destination site with Webmaster Tools validation, META tagging and domain XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt for each market

28. Thank you  Dan Cohen Global SEO Engineering Lead dan.cohen@microsoft.com | http://dancohen.info/