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]]>Nathan Buggia and Vanessa Fox, the pair behind search and search-friendly web development site JaneAndRobot.com, held the educational networking event at the Yahoo! Center in Santa Monica. Buggia, lead program manager at Live Search, and Fox, a former Googler best known for her role in creating webmaster Central, gave a presentation on identifying a site’s SEO setbacks.
Nathan Buggia & Vanessa Fox. Photo by Wm. Marc Salsberry – Entrepreneur/Photographer.
“The L.A. tech scene is more vibrant than people know,” Fox said. “If you look at San Francisco and to a lesser extent Seattle, the networking itself makes the community stronger. I think in L.A. that’s starting to happen, and as that happens more there’s a lot of untapped potential to be realized.”
Focused on one piece of the SEO and web dev relationship, Buggia and Fox outlined the steps in diagnosing ranking and indexing problems. Fox noted that SEOs sometimes look at ranking as the goal and a lack of rankings as the problem. But she compared a site’s rankings to the tip of an iceberg—merely the surface appearance of a larger hidden structure. From crawling to indexing to ranking, the process of getting a site to rank in a search engine follows a path.
To that end, Fox identified a flow chart to help locate a clog in the pipeline:
Fox said that she will be writing a post on her site NineByBlue.com about a more complex and comprehensive flow chart soon.
Other technical recommendations shared at the event include:
According to Fox, she and Buggia were inspired to hold educational events aimed at both search marketers and developers after observing a gap in communication and understanding between the two groups. Approximately 50 people attended the event Tuesday, with about half the crowd made up of developers and half identifying as search marketers. Following the presentation, Buggia and Fox answered audience questions ranging from nofollow use to image optimization to the canonical link element.
Yahoo SEO manager Tony Adam planned and organized the event and was pleased with the outcome and attendee enthusiasm.
“They did an excellent job covering the technical topics and attracting the web dev, search and marketing crowds,” Adam said. “It would be great to have more Jane and Robot events in L.A. to keep the conversation going.”
More photos of the event can be found here.
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