SEO Strategies for Large Websites

Yesterday I attended a session at Pubcon on SEO & SEM for large websites. The speakers included Marshall Simmons from the N.Y. Times and Bill Hunt from IBM.com Global Strategies as well as two other excellent speakers.

I was struck by some key points they made. Most of their challenges in managing SEO and SEM for large website, typically with more than 1 million pages, are organizational issues, not best practice issues.

For example, Simmons gave the example that one of the first actions he took when he assumed the role of Chief Search Strategist at the N.Y. Times was to move “N.Y. Times” from the beginning of the title tag to the end of it so the primary keywords were presented first to the engines. He said orchestrating that change with their IT folks took some selling and some time. He also shared that working with long tenured journalists and asking their collaboration in writing content that is search engine friendly is challenging. He said he views a part of his job to educate staff, including veterans and new hires, on how to think in ways that will benefit their SEO efforts. Often it can come down to internal communication about new deals, announcements, ventures, etc., that can be leveraged in their search strategy. He referenced a situation where he heard about a new deal that was done that could have been leveraged in his SEO efforts had it been communicated to him in advance.

One point made that resonates with me is the importance of communicating successes. In SEO often results can take months to fully realize. So, where there is a success it should be communicated throughout the organization to fuel the education process and the inspiration process.

Another point worth mentioning is that other teams in the organization can implement marketing programs which should be communicated to the SEO team. For example, an offline advertising campaign should be orchestrated to ensure continuity of SEO strategy especially if there are landing pages involved. You wouldn’t want advertising driving traffic to an outdated landing page. This is important not just to maintain consistency in messaging, but in technical architecture.

Sometimes advertising campaigns use tracking codes, which can be “the kiss of death” in SEO. Orchestrating such details can have a big impact on SEO success in a large website.

Another point mentioned is the importance of standardizing on the CMS architecture so it is friendly and consistent to the SEO strategy. Details such as the global size and font of the header tags, and allowing the SEO team full control over the meta data of each web page so that each page is unique. When IT maintains control over such details, that’s a “worst practice.”

These are just a few of the key points presented during this session. I was struck by the commonality of these issues with SMB SEO (small, medium businesses). The only difference really is the magnitude of the issues.

In the end SEO best practices are SEO best practices.

Everyone involved in creating content or in marketing in any organization no matter the size, needs to have an understanding of SEO best practices. Just like a football team needs 11 guys working together on the field so does a business need to have all relevant members of the team understanding their respective roles in SEO success and cooperating.

Bernie Borges

@berniebay

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