The new year has come - time for summaries and plans for the coming months. The Community team also looked back and rewarded a Dynatracer who supported the Community team a lot behind the scenes. Gerald Haydtner, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, not only helped during the Community platform migration and showed essential factors affecting its visibility but is still with us to bring the Community and its content to the next level.
In the below interview, you’ll get to know @ghaydtner - our SEO Magician better!
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Can you tell us a little bit about your professional life? What’s your role at Dynatrace, and what do you do?
I’ve started working at Dynatrace in the Linz office back in October 2015, when we were just 200 employees in Austria. I joined the team working on the next-generation product, Ruxit, as a Content Magician. Over time, my role evolved as the product name evolved from Ruxit to Dynatrace Ruxit and finally Dynatrace.
Our digital marketing team merged, rebranded, and relaunched our websites. Soon, I managed both paid search and SEO and with the growing team, I now focus mainly on SEO. As a Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO, I built my own team for that, and we are working on optimizing all our web properties to increase our organic traffic and visibility on Google and other search engines.
SEO includes a variety of things, from optimizing pages with metadata and structured data, working with our content teams to create new content, doing technical optimizations, or giving guidance to optimize page speed to fulfill Google’s Core Web Vitals criteria. For the Community, for example, I spun up a redirect service for the old URLs within an hour to make the transition from the old provider to the new provider smoother. That results in ongoing new challenges, especially as search engines evolve how work, and therefore strategies and tactics need to be adopted.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our platform and for what project?
I started to use Dynatrace for the self-monitoring of our web properties like the Marketing website, the blog, the documentation. Nowadays, I even have a “Dynatrace UFO” near the coffee machine on my floor to literally “see” what’s going on in our Dynatrace tenant. If it’s turning red, there is a major issue, and I get alerted via Slack too and can quickly look at what is going on and work with our developers to fix it if needed.
Have you ever had any compelling use case for the Dynatrace platform that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
I used Dynatrace to monitor my laptop for a year, as I was also running a Node.js webserver to preview website changes locally. Monitoring my own machine resulted in interesting dashboards that were visualizing my work life, at least my work time. 😊
What brought you to our Community? What is your best memory about it? Why do you think it’s important to be a part of the Community?
When I learned that the Dynatrace Community is moving to a new platform, I was happy to accompany that migration from my SEO perspective to make the Community even more visible on Google & co. I just realized that I’m user #4 on the Community, so I was on the new platform right from the beginning. And the team around the Community is awesome and open for SEO ideas, so it’s fun to work with them.
We have seen that with the Log4j vulnerability, the questions and answers on the Community were the first content online about this topic, answering questions from customers around the world. And as an SEO manager, I also see what our users are interested in, what their questions are, and therefore what trends are evolving.
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
I love to dance, especially ballroom dancing with my wife. That’s not so easy these days, so my smoking and tailcoat remain in the wardrobe. But once possible, we’d love to attend one of those traditional Viennese balls again to dance the slow waltz, Viennese waltz, … But my kids keep me moving anyhow, and as we all love to ski, we had a chance to go skiing recently (and to build snowmen).
It would also be great if you could share with us your favorite movie, song and/or a book. Let other Community members discover something new and interesting to watch/hear/read 🙂
At this time of the year, Frank Sinatra’s “Let it snow” is still on my mind. In Austria, we have an unofficial hymn, “Schifoan” (Skiing – by Wolfgang Ambros), highlighting the fun you can have while skiing.
A great book I read recently is “Lost and Founder” by Rand Fishkin. He is an inspiring speaker I met at the SMX years ago, and in his book, he tells the story of his startup, Moz. According to Rand, it’s the most awful, sometimes awesome truth about building a tech startup. It’s both inspiring and eye-opening.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gerald, it was great to speak with you and get to know you better. We live in a time where online visibility is one of the key elements of advantage in business, and we are happy to have you on board!
Thank you for your continuous effort to improve the Community platform performance and SEO.
6 Comments
