I am super fired up for this session! The session starts off with the idea that you need to audit your SEO on a monthly, if not, continual basis backed by robust analytics and reporting. We know how to optimize these days, small sites are easy to optimize. But when you start to deal with the large dynamic sites. It is funny because people are talking about theming pages, which eVisibility has been doing since day one. We call it the keyword assignment or SEO road map, this matches what keywords are optimized for in what pages. Part of this strategy is also centered around theming the page around the main term of that page. For example, if your page is about laptops then that is the main term for that page. But the secondary terms would support that term by following its theme, so then we get cheap laptops, lightweight laptops, affordable laptops, etc.

When optimizing large corporate sites you really need to lay things out for the company’s tech team, you need to train them. Create a knowledge base, explain why certain elements on each page are important, and be sure to audit each page continually and give them the recommendations on how to better optimize the page. Software is the bet way to manage this process as you can imagine, because of the sheer number of pages on these large corporate sites. Define and deploy a too framework for analytics, management, and reporting. You MUST be able to give one bullet for the CEO or head honcho each month at least. It gives visibility to your efforts and can help facilitate deployment. Of course prioritize the best performing keywords over lesser ones. At eVisibility we optimize for many terms but know that it is important to focus on a smaller set of the “money” terms until they get to where you want them and then move the focus on to the next most important bucket of keywords. If you try to hit ALL of the terms at the same time your strategy will lack the focus necessary the rank for those tough money terms.

Marshall Simmons from Hearst Publishing (NY Times) steps up and notes that you need audits and reassessments, actionable SEO checklists, and ongoing training for all staff including content team and project managers. I would add the sales team and high level management to that training schedule. Fortunately for eVisibility our President and Founder, Danny DeMichele, really understands organic SEO well (shameless plug: thanks for sending us to SMX West Danny!) Something that many people need to work better on is planning for seasonality. Setting a marketing calendar is something that really helps facilitate this. I think that this is especially important for the paid search and online media departments!

Q & A time. Most of the time we start optimizing well after the site has launched so you need to help build off of existing strengths and look for the quick wins. This has been one of my personal mantras for a very long time now. Anyone of our sales people have heard my pitch on this! The rest of the session goes on to talk about different tools that can be used to audit large sites. At eVisibility we have some of our own tools built in-house and it seems that most of the panelists agree that building in-house tools is usually necessary. It can be expensive but hey if it were easy then there would already be a solution out there for everyone to use!

Overall I was hoping for more insights from the various Internet marketing companies in this session but I am beginning to realize that we are actually doing all the right things already! Maybe I should be on some of these panels… no scratch that I should and I will.