SEO as an industry has matured over the years and more organizations have started to see the value of SEO and how it can generate revenues. Traditionally, companies outsourced all of their SEO activities to external agencies but over the past few years an increasing number of well known companies have added SEO experts as part of their workforce. One of those well known companies is CNN. And managing CNN’s SEO initiatives in-house is none other than Topher Kohan. I met Topher many years back at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose and my first question to him was what was the biggest SEO challenge he faces at CNN. I still remember his answer was “to get CNN at the top of the search results as soon as the news is published.” Well, looks like he has cracked that code and is now onto much bigger things at CNN. So, without further ado I am very pleased to have Topher Kohan with us sharing his game plan on what it takes to succeed at in-house SEO for CNN.

(Watch video interview below or read full text)

Bob Tripathi: So tell me how different it is to be working for CNN that has a PageRank of 10?
Topher Kohan: So obviously I have to do no link building. I mean not really as lot of people link to our content so that part is easy. The tough part is about keyword management, coz we gotta have keywords that are evergreen like the generic news terms that we have manage them well, then we have our branded key terms for which we better rank # 1 or close to #1 for those. Then we have the set of terms that could change daily, weekly, monthly terms like the breaking news key terms. We have no idea what is going to happen to them tomorrow so we have to be really flexible to be able to get those terms, track those terms, and use those terms effectively.
Bob Tripathi: So, it’s really interesting with your branded terms that if CNN don’t rank at number 1 for their branded terms then Google would look bad?
Topher Kohan: Right. Because if someone types in CNN and we don’t show up there then there is a question as to what is going on there.
Bob Tripathi: The question I am getting at is how easy it is for you to sell your SEO ideas inside CNN and do people get it?
Topher Kohan: About 90% of my job, day to day job I should say, is about evangelizing. You gotta get the buy in and for me that is at multiple levels. I gotta get the editorial staff really buying in; the editors buy in, the middle management, then the editorial management and all the way up to the executive producer of digital news for CNN. Luckily for me, I have got my buy in through lot of training, evangelizing, and working together with them. So if it is a run of the mill kind of a day and there is something breaking but not earth shattering then through the evangelizing and working with the other teams in training them that is something they can handle on their own so it is great because that leaves me time to see what’s next as really all my competitors are putting out great content and they all their SEO’s on staff like me. So I have got to make sure that I do the little tiny things and the tiny things are tweaked all along so I can get the little rankings so I can get higher traffic.
Bob Tripathi: One of the things of being CNN is once the news goes out how do you try rank yourself at top of the search when you have all these competitors putting out great content and trying to rank higher for breaking news?
Topher Kohan: It doesn’t hurt to have a high pagerank. I am not a believer that my high pagerank will get me ranking higher but it does help in me garner inbound linking faster which will get my ranking higher. It is really working well with my editorial staff as I said where we are optimizing that headline, the content on the page, and doing that effectively, fast, and on the fly and not being afraid to change quickly to what we are doing isn’t working. So we are not seeing ourselves ranking high enough in the first 30 minutes but we should be okay to change, maybe when we change 2 more times, before we get to that magic synergy where everything works and we are ranking at # 1 or 2 for all search terms that we think people are searching for. And you have to know that the first 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, you are making an educated guess its probably why you get paid for working at a news company is making an educated guess.  Is it Michael Jackson dead, or Michael Jackson Died or King of Pop so you have to make kind of educated guess. You can monitor everything with Twitter trends and Google trends all those things but if you are good at your job then you are making a gut check.
Bob Tripathi: Great point. Gut check and that is what marketing is about. How do you allocate your time? Keyword research, SEO copy, SEO content, SEO training?
Topher Kohan: Training is a big one, looking over copy is a big one. We use an agency, Turner does and CNN gets the benefit of using Bruce Clay. I am lucky to have them as they do lot of bigger keyword research for me, if its breaking news then I do it live myself, but if it’s bigger project then I am lucky to have them do it for me. But a lot of my time is spend on looking at new content, new pages, new sections, new specials, new new new as we are an evolving site as every new site is. We are constantly reinventing what we do and how we do it so I have got to be on top of that. So it’s more like a 150% of my day divided between many things.
Bob Tripathi: So are you the only guy in the conference with a pagerank of 10?
Topher Kohan: Well, I am not the only guy in the conference with a page rank of 10 but I am the only news site guy with a  page rank of 10. I try to remind my friends at other news sites that I have a page rank of 10 and that’s because we are CNN. We have a great name recognition which helps me a lot.
Bob Tripathi: Right the organic way of building links…
Topher Kohan: Correct.
Bob Tripathi: Now CNN.com has got lots of videos on site so are you optimizing videos for search?
Topher Kohan: Part of why I am here is really optimizing content around the video. We have now play and place video which is great for us. Before you had to click a video which used to take to a separate video page but now we have play in place video which we are starting to implement. We have great XML sitemaps and also implementing search monkey tags. In essence if you give more information to the search engines then you would get more out of them. Indexing is not an issue for us; our issue is showing content for the right keywords.
Bob Tripathi: CNN recently went through a site redesign so how much was SEO part of that process?
Topher Kohan: Because of the 2008 presidential elections I got a big buy-in from designers and developers as I showed a big win and they were like look this SEO stuff does work. So when it came time to do the redesign which we launched in October I was included from wireframes to design concepts to the first vision of coding to site code and all the way through. Not everything I wanted was included but that’s okay. I got the big stuff, we didn’t take any step backwards, and really some important stuff I am going to put it in really quick sprint list that got us up to speed. I am completely happy with how the process works and also working with some other properties within Turner to show them that this stuff does work and SEO should be part of the process.
Bob Tripathi: For the benefit of our audience what are the top 3 things you recommend SEO’s to do?
Topher Kohan: Any content site – does not matter it is news or you are writing about beanie babies think of good content. And you want good user experience on the site. You want to make sure your titles tags are written really well and give your user good experience. I have nothing to back this up but my gut check. I truly believe that search engines like Google is never going to penalize you for giving the user good experience. Content without context is not a good user experience.
Bob Tripathi: It’s also called Spam right?
Topher Kohan: That’s right.
Bob Tripathi: Topher, thanks a lot for doing this for us and sharing your insights. Glad to have you.
Topher Kohan: Thank you!

About Topher Kohan:

Topher Kohan came to CNN.com, a division of Turner broadcasting and a Time Warner company, in early 2008 after two years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As the in-house SEO coordinator for CNN.com and the rest of Turner’s news properties (including CNN Money, CNN International and iReport), he has overseen a 17 percent increase in traffic from search year to year and oversaw one of the single largest search traffic days in the site’s history with the 2008 presidential election. He also over saw all of the SEO for the Fall re-launch of CNN.com.

Topher graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta with a degree in Web development and interactive media design with an emphasis on SEO/SEM.

Before working in the SEO world, Topher was a lighting designer / tour manager / production manger for various entertainment companies and touring groups.

Topher is also very proud to be a Eagle Scout

You can follow Topher on Twitter @Topheratl or visit his personal blog at Topher Kohan

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