Interview with Warren Lee ahead of SMX West 2012 in San Jose

February 22nd, 2012 01:40 PM

Interview with Warren Lee ahead of SMX West 2012 in San Jose

Hello, Warren! February 28, a lot of digital marketers will gather for SMX West 2012 in San Jose. You will be one of the speakers on this important Internet marketing event. So, this interview is a great and unique possibility for our readers and us to get acquainted with you and with your activity.

Could you tell us something about your life, family? Where were you born?
Hi, I am a self-taught SEO manager and have been involved in SEO for Realtor.com and Adobe Systems. When I’m not working on SEO strategy at ADOBE, I enjoy photography, all types of fishing, and tinkering with vintage Japanese motorcycles.

What education did you get? Something connected with marketing or not?
I have a BA in advertising from an art school and I taught myself SEO in order to market my own photography portfolio, and this is how I got into SEO.

When and why did you start your Internet marketing business as a SEO specialist?
I have been building online content since the mid 90’s, and SEO has been a natural function of this, but I didn’t professionally work in SEO specifically until I joined MOVE Inc.

At MOVE Inc. I helped Realtor.com grow its SEO footprint to remain the top visited website in real estate as report in Comsore, and I worked to effectively replace the entire SEM budget with unpaid SEO traffic. We had many successful SEO projects which included complete CMS overhaul, legacy systems re-platforming, two site redesigns, and also we created and managed to index over 70 million pages of property records for SEO.

Now you are a SEO Manager in ADOBE Company. What is the main difference in optimization of such global project as ADOBE and average ones?
Now at Adobe, I find SEO is very much the same, but add in global SEO into the mix; even tighter alignment with SEM thanks to involvement with a very tight cross functional team and highly evolved analytics, and more involvement with site search as well. All the common challenges of SEO evangelism and applying SEO into a highly matrixed organization exist at ADOBE, but overall I have been fortunate to work at companies that really understand the value of SEO.

Do you use any specific link building techniques or just stimulate a natural links mass?
I’d support that it’s better to focus on creating quality content, and I spend most of my time focused on improving site architecture challenges, improving internal linking, and advocating SEO best practices, not link building.

What difficulties do you face in working on such large-scale project promotion? How do you cope with them?
Some challenges include breaking down internal silos and building the right relationships with the right people. I believe that enterprise SEO is very much a political endeavor and relationships based endeavor as much as it is a technically challenging job. Finding ways to increase the SEO team’s influence in the organization by creating a culture of SEO is the best way to cope. It isn’t possible to do enterprise SEO all on your own, it’s a team effort. Training and getting help from others is the only way to cope with the challenge.

Tell us, please, some words about your SEO department. How many people work there? What is the hierarchy in the team?
We are an all-in house search team that spans site search, paid search and SEO. We cover all areas of SEO for adobe.com globally. There are 30 employees assigned to the specific SEM team, but I like to think that everyone at ADOBE is part of the SEO team in one way or another. My focus is on SEO for all the digital media products, like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and creative suite. I support SEO for North America, and help support the global SEO strategy as well. I’m also proud to be in a SEAL 6 TEAM of marketers, the hierarchy and more about it was recently published here.

On the 1st of March, we will be glad to hear your speech. It will be about SEO techniques for large organizations. Could you share with us some key issues or you prefer to keep an intrigue?
The key issues I am looking to address are related to organizational focus and processes for enterprise SEO. I’ll discuss what works well, and share what I have seen when things don’t work so well also. The main take away I want to impart is that SEO is touches on more areas than even the largest team can personally manage, so creating a culture of SEO and finding ways to include SEO as part of your companies processes is the best way to help foster the growth of a successful large scale SEO program.

What is your personal secret of success?
I’ve always felt that there is a whole lot misinformation about SEO on the internet, largely from a lot of talk about what is good for SEO, without a whole lot of real world proof to back much of it up. I question just about anything any one tells me about SEO, and then test it in a controlled environment. It’s also important to share these learning publically or in a private network of other likeminded marketers. I do both as much as possible, which gives me the confidence to speak truthfully about what I know and what I don’t know in regard to SEO.

What do you expect from attending SMX West 2012?
Given the SEO landscape is rapidly changing, I’m looking forward to speaking with other SEO managers and speakers about what tests they are running, and I’m looking forward to discuss industry trends. I enjoy hearing about what is working, what isn’t, and talking about new search trends. I expect that there will be some interesting focus on Google + and how search and social is evolving.

Please, try to draw a verbal image of the successful modern digital marketer? How do you imagine him/her?
Ha, that’s a funny question. I tried to think of a visual image to use as reference. Unfortunately my first thought was of the recent cartoon of Dilbert and the pant less weasel. The comic strip is posted on my Google+ page.
Both are playing the part of digital marketers. This image describes the modern marketer on several different levels. Some wear suits, some wear jeans and t-shirt, some are business types, others a bit geeky, and others are pant less weasels.

According to your professional point of view, what changes are waiting for SEO strategies in 2012?
I expect SEO fundamentals will still stay the same in 2012. Social influence and other new ranking signals will come into play, and as a result, other signals will have less impact. I expect Google will get better at looking at how people interact with the web, and use this to guide ranking signals as well. Now that Chrome is getting more popular, Google has access to much more data to be able to potentially make ranking more influenced by user behavior. I think the value of links is slowly going to decline, and give way to the value of social interaction and user interaction. I believe this is a good thing.

Now we would like to ask several personal questions.

Your desk book? – "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt
People you hold up as an example? – Goethe, because he was an accomplished person of both art and science, and a great philosopher as well.
Mac or PC? Both
iPhone or Android? Both
Favorite brand? ADOBE
Wishes for 2012? – No apocalypse please.

Thanks a lot for this interview! We wish you to show your best during SMX West 2012 sessions! See you soon!

Dear readers, we invite you to visit Warren Lee's blog or follow him on Twitter.

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