Scott Fish

Industrial Strength SEO Strategies had a great panel of large site SEO managers or consultants that really knew their “stuff”.

Martin Laetsch, the senior director of search strategy at Convario, Inc was the first to speak on large site SEO strategies.  One of the first major points that he made was the fact that many of the people in the room with large sites understand that with a larger site, it’s really difficult to choose which sections of the site to optimize first, let along in an efficient way.  If you have thousands of pages it’s very important to find an efficient way to optimize those pages. 

Martin highlighted the fact that many companies do an annual or quarterly audit of their site and its performance, which is simply not enough.  Especially in an industry where SEO Strategies evolve and change almost on a monthly or weekly basis as algorithms change.  So what is the best way to tackle this problem? 

1. Understand and develop standards and procedures.

2.  Make sure that you have the technology behind your site to allow ease of management (i.e a good CMS)

His steps for managing large scale SEO follow 4 steps:

1.      First, perform a detailed SEO audit which identifies repeatable steps that you can then automate on a monthly basis.

2.      Second, develop a good set of standards and best-practices.  This is very important, especially in a large corporate environment because content writers need to have a solid outline of SEO strategies that they can keep in mind when writing new content.  He recommended setting up a knowledge base and creating easy step-by-step optimization guides for different business units and areas.  I really like this idea and will be using this concept and taking it into the SEO & Design Agency arena.

3.      Third, and this is an important one, continue to make improvements with execution.  It doesn’t make any sense to do a lot of SEO research and work if the strategy doesn’t get implemented.  The technology (a CMS) behind your site should allow for easy of SEO Strategy implementation.  If it doesn’t, this can be a problem.

4.      The last step falls under the reporting function – recommendations here are to ensure continuous modifications and improvements to your SEO strategy and allow for those changes to be monitored and reported via analysis and reporting tools.

Yahoo’s Director of Search Engine Marketing, David Roth, was next to speak.  He manages SEO Strategy for Yahoo’s Site (ie. Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Tech, Yahoo Finance, etc) and not the Search Engine part of the business.

David pointed out that he shares the same reasoning for doing internal SEO as all of the attendees to SMX West.  Simply put, search is the best way to acquire new customers.  Yahoo has many business units and employs several monetization methods, including subscriptions (yahoo dating), ISP services, domain name and business to business services, and ISP services.  They also engage in lead generation and CPM models.