• Big Site SEO - Andrew Gerhart -Primedia Automotive -  communication is key, saying the same thing as Bill Hunt, which is get SEO into the workflow.

Technology can work for you or against you - there is a replication process - before starting you need to define a project team and pick the right people to be part of it.  All these different groups will be touching the process.

Research keywords and content of a site - take a look at what is already in place first.  Also, they use targeting hundreds and thousands of keywords - also remember how the people be reacting to your second level pages.

With a large site it’s very important to defining site structure.  When someone gets to your site they need all the options needed to search.  Also need to avoid site silos and avoid dead ends.  Define link structure - when you have a large site you need multiple entry links to get to the same content.

Large sites will usually be dynamic and you can set rules that create deep links - links are created automatically - that’s very important because a sitemap can’t link to all pages.

With sitemaps you can have it be an RSS Feed that updates any time there’s a new page added, among other options.

Define URL structure and eliminate session variables, query strings while rewriting urls to insert keywords and keep the urls clean.

SEO techniques - most don’t change but what might be different in time is keyword targeting, internal linking, code optimization, content optimization and ability to test.

Vinny Lingham - Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of incuBeta spoke next about trying to find niche keywords using very large keyword lists.

1. multiple se’s more to manage and look at
2. keyword inflation = optimizing the tail becomes crucial
3. complexity (campaigns/goals/constraints/keywords)
4. scarcity of staff = knowledge must be institutionalized

Challenges of management

• address all markets
• deep link all keywords esp the 1m+ keyword campaigns - data feeds help
• keyword tail
• track or act on fragmented and rapidly changing data
• staff with SEM skills
• integrate data
• understand what keywords to bid on - can not actively monitor or maintain millions of tail keywords.

Effective SEM is challenge

• highly volatile
• market driven - optimize for target markets and demand cycles
• hyper competitive - cost of keywords going up
• dual edged - keyword search is becoming more analytical than marketing only
• more than just bidding - Google has changed the dynamic of PPC
• spreading the list across longer tail keywords and great benefits

What does Google want from us:

• Google focuses on user relevance
• quality score vs PPC
• position = AdRank (price x quality score)
• quality score = landing page score x ctr x geo targeting x ad copy score x language targeting x keyword mach type score)
• tail low volume vs head high volume - volatility
• Trademarks/Branded vs Generic

What does Overture want from us:

• money

Finally Fredrick Marckini from iProspect

Fredrick talked about a site that wanted to be optimized for the finest glass tobacco pipes.  First Challenges are:

• this site is a disaster (you don’t want to say this to them - that the site is a Frankenstein Monster)
• internal mechanics are "jury rigged" and Fredrick gave a case study.
• massive site that run on three different platforms and change prices by hand (hotel pricing and airfare pricing are on different systems)

To work with a site like this the seo had to have multiple campaigns even though it was the same domain.  The time to engage to in Search Engine marketing experts is before the site is redesigns.

Second big challenge:

• Complicated CMS system - SEO more difficult here
• IT resistance - need to understand their technology first to gain the IT staff confidence.
• Involve IT when choosing SEO vendors
• involve IT teams with Geek speaks to Geek

Third big challenge:

• Link Popularity - smaller sites go after Link popularity while large sites need to pursue "linking relationships"
• for example, one client had a relationship with Forbes needed to manage that to their advantage, another published info about companies and got to ask for links from the companies.

When dealing with a large site

• vendor should have experience with large sites
• can travel and educate teams
• been around a while (3-5 year engagements)
• industry stature (thought leadership)

Do you have an ugly site baby - because if you do..you need SEO nip tuck…..

Questions:

1. How do you know? Bill Hunt answers - we know from the change that it happens in multiple sites and countries so we can see the jumps.  We can quantify the changes.  We don’t purposely try to undo the work but sometimes someone else will tweak the page, not on purpose, but will set the page.   Mike Grehan is questioning Bill and getting him to talk about the book.

2. Question for Bill Hunt - woman works for a high tech company that hired to Sheri Throw for usability - and she wants to know how Bill trained 250 people on usability?  Bill showed the opportunity matrix and shocked the hell out of the manager - and Bill told them what they had to do.  Show how it impacts what they do - good for ego of writers.  Also, Bill is in the process of using new content and having it certified.  What helps drive that - and because IBM sold off the PC business to Lenovo - we don’t sell to the consumer any longer - all are sales are B2B.  We found the most people who were interested in Organic Search.   We could not do that with PPC because it was too expensive, even for the tail search words.    Also the searcher continuum - for most people, what they rank for is crap.  What pages also come up. 

The problem with most organic campaigns off the bat is that people who run them are more concerned with traffic or ranking than the quality of what they can do when they get to the site.  When you look at what you can do from a link that goes to a page - you have to improve that.

Think about shelf space and leverage syndication parters to get multiple listing via the surround sound effect.