Chances are you don’t have a site that matches the size of what Microsoft has, but in the age of real-time user-generated content, there is a whole lot of content going up on the web. Wheeler (and ultimately Microsoft’s) strategy deals with “mega” sites.

“It’s a large complicated website where the content is generated by multiple business units in many different countries in many different languages, and you’re trying to get things done within a complex, large organization, where there’s just a lot of dependencies – a lot of stakeholders – a lot of different interests,” explains Wheeler.

“A lot of people talk about ‘content is king. content is king,’ says Wheeler. “With ‘mega SEO,’ structure is king because without structure, your content won’t even be discovered.”

I’d still recommend producing great content, but when you’re talking about a site the size of Microsoft.com, Wheeler has a point.

“Some of the situations with our site, Microsoft.com…we’ll have one million pages of navigation to get to fourteen thousand pages of content, and the way that you get to that content determines the URL of the final landing page, so every final landing page of content will have however many different ways there are of getting to it duplicated, so you know, you’ve got like twenty million URLs just for fourteen thousand pages,” he says. “So a lot of mega SEO is about crawl efficiency – making your site more efficient for crawling and indexing.”

“One of the things that we deal with are the crawler efficiencies – things like large scale duplicate content or just junk content – outdated content – content that’s been up for like five years, but the person that managed it left the company and no one took over so there’s just content sitting out there that engines have to index,” he continues. “We don’t want that stuff surfacing. We want our new stuff, so getting rid of legacy content, trying to fix things at the platform level, so you don’t continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over or just build on the issues that you have with your existing content management system.”

“But one of our challenges is we have multiple content management systems,” he adds. “We’ve got one primary for one section, another section of the site might have two or three that they use. I mean it’s basically all over the board.”

“I can’t just go in and fix the CMS and have everything magically fixed. We have to go in and prioritize what CMS we want to try to work with,” he adds.

How do you deal with that? Turn to the IT guys of course.

“MSIT was involved with that – our IT department,” says Wheeler. “They can tell when the content that hadn’t been updated in a certain amount of time and then they reached out to who were listed as the owners of that section and they contacted them and asked them if they still needed that content, and if there was no response in a certain amount of time, they would just remove it. And if they did respond then they would work out whether or not this content was still valid, and if it wasn’t then they all agreed that it would be removed.”

“It was a lot of email chains that I was on,” he adds. “Hundreds of emails back and fourth to get all this accomplished, and I think they removed probably a million, two million URLs from the site just by that one exercise.”

Penalties? For Microsoft?

“A lot of these pages of content weren’t getting any traffic,” Wheeler notes. “That was another way that we could tell that they were not really useful….We didn’t go in and manually map them to any other section of the site.”

You might think search engines would penalize you for having 2 million URLs that go nowhere, but when you’re Microsoft, that’s not something you really need to worry about (and it’s not like Google would treat the competition unfairly).

“I don’t think an engine is going to dock us for having pages of content that were really old and not updated and removing them from our website, and the proper response for a page that no longer exists is the 404,” says Wheeler. “I don’t think that they would penalize us for that. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“We could’ve gone in probably and found some that were valuable and redirected them somewhere, but in general, our site has a lot of authority just because when we launch something, we get a ton of links,” he says. “You know, people – bloggers are always talking about Microsoft and all the stuff that we’re doing. Our site in general has a lot of authority, so it wasn’t a big priority for us at the time.”

For “mega” sites, this is probably the case a lot of times.

Small Strides For a Big Impact

When you’re talking about a site the size of Microsoft.com, there are other things besides irrelevant content that are likely to come into play. “That’s just one aspect of mega SEO,” says Wheeler. “The other would be the international piece – it’s huge for us, because we have close to a hundred different countries and many different languages, and there’s 23 countries that we really focus a lot on, but our content – the way we publish it basically…for Australia, their content can be in a lot of different places scattered all over our website, and it’s hard for them to manage their SEO when their content’s spread all over the place.”

“So one of the things we’ve tried to do is come up with a standard international URL policy, because without that, it’s hard for a country to even manage their own content,” he says. “Event that’s been a battle because some of the content management systems that we publish on can’t conform to that structure so it’s just a constant….with mega SEO it’s about making small strides over time that [when] grouped together they have a really big impact.”

Who’s in Charge of the Whole Site? It’s Just Ballmer.

“There’s so many different business groups and our website Microsoft.com doesn’t roll up to a single person until it gets to Steve Ballmer,” says Wheeler. “As soon as you break off of Steve Ballmer, you’ve got someone else that’s responsible for MSDN TechNet. There’s another business group that’s responsible for the support site…so we don’t have a centralized authority that manages the entire Microsoft.com domain. So it’s very difficult because some businesses will make decisions on what’s in their best interest, and it might not really be what’s in the best interest of our site as a single domain name.”

“The first thing I did was really try to draw an image (because I’m very visual) of what are all the pieces involved in order to optimize the site,” says Wheeler of his approach. “And for us…there’s four levels of where the SEO occurs on the site, and to support those four levels, there’s a lot of what we’ll call workstreams or initiatives or focus areas that support those four levels.”

SEO by Level

“The first level is the site-wide SEO,” explains Wheeler. “That’s the crawl efficiency stuff we talked about. The next level is subsidiary level SEO, which is the international piece and working with them.”

“The next is what we call site-specific so there might be an individual site on Microsoft.com – they want to do SEO…well we have three levels and they can do it themselves and we provide guidance, they can do a little bit with an agency (just have the agency do the keyword research, do some training…), or they can do a full service agency program,” he continues. “And then there’s the people who say, ‘I want to optimize this page for this keyword’. Well, we’ll give them some generic advice like, ‘you should use that word on your page and you should actually think [about] more than just that page and on board to one of our site-specific programs.’”

How Do You Measure All of This?

“And then in support of that we have a standard measurement framework, because when I got there, there was a lot of different ways that people were measuring SEO,” he says. “In fact, our site in general…half the site uses one web analytics application, the other half uses another, and some of them are tagged with both.”

“Just getting all the metrics is a challenge,” Wheeler adds. “And then we also have search technology that needs to scale for all four levels. We’ve got our own set of web crawlers set up to crawl our site to look for those big issues, and we can also crawl individual sites and tell them where their SEO problems are.”

Gathering the Masses

“We work with agencies, vendors…anything we can to help us scale this out,” says Wheeler. “We had a two-day Microsoft-only SEO Summit called XMS (which is SMX backwards), but stands for cross-Microsoft. We had over 560 attendees that were all Microsoft people. We had all Microsoft speakers, which I thought was incredible that one company could have 560 attendees to an internal SEO event, and the entire event cost seventeen thousand dollars for 560 people. Now if we sent them all to a conference like [PubCon], that would be like 560 thousand dollars plus travel.”

“And it was Microsoft-specific…all of the content was targeted towards Microsoft websites and out of that, we found a lot of internal ‘SEO rock stars’ that I can start building relationships with, and they’re great evangelists across the company.”

As you can see, “mega SEO” is no minor feat. How would you like to have Wheeler’s job? We also talked with Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth Consulting at PubCon about the challenges of big company SEO. These companies may get a lot of links and rankings, but it’s not exactly easy.

Another Search Engine Strategies Conference, another conversation about the future of search. It’s a regular topic, but one that never loses relevance, as the search landscape continues to change dramatically, even between conferences. Look at all Google has done this year, for example. Not only did we get the left panel navigation, but Instant search. Those are probably the biggest changes to the interface, but there are plenty of other things going on. This week, they just started adding location information to the left panel, for example.

Google makes changes constantly all year round, and that’s just Google. Yahoo and Bing obviously have a lot going on as well. Bing has a new partnership with Facebook for putting Facebook data in search results. Then there’s the whole Yahoo/Bing search and advertising deal, with Yahoo returning Bing results underneath its own user interface.

Search simply does not stop changing. With mobile and social media heavily in the equation, and TV and tablets about to enter the fray at an increasingly rapid pace, there will continue to be plenty to speculate upon when it comes to where search is headed.

So this year’s SES Chicago “Search: Where to Next?” session featured discussion from iProspect CEO Robert Murray, Bruce Clay President Bruce Clay, and Rosetta Director of SEO Chris Boggs.

Here are a few takeaways from that discussion:

1. Keyword research may be narrowed down by all three search engines.
2. Autocomplete needs to branch out.
3. There will be deeper analytics.
4. Building content will continue to be very important
5. There will be increased filtering of search results by users.
6. SEO is going the way of a targeted market.
7. Complexity of keywords is changing because of the algorithms
8. SEO is going to be “a piece of optimization pie.”
9. There will be increased focus on local.
10. Even as mobile continues to grow, there will always be search.
11. Social will continue to play an important role. Likes will become as important as links.

Visibility

If you ask me, it’s going to be (and really already is) about being visible in as many places as possible – on as many screens as possible. It’s about being visible in search engines, but it’s also about being visible in communities (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.), sub search engines (like Google Images, Blog Search, Videos, YouTube, etc.), mobile apps, web apps, TV apps, and anywhere else that consumers turn their attention – particularly the kind of attention that comes with problems for which your content has the answer – for which your business has the answer.

The future is going to require a lot of testing.

Testing on different browsers, different phones, different tablets, different connected TV experiences, different apps, and different combinations of each of these. It’s also going to be about speed. Not only is Google placing more and more emphasis on this, but people will just simply leave if they can’t get your site to load in a timely fashion. It may be fine on the desktop, but have you checked it from different mobile devices/browsers? How’s it look from there?

Improving Tech

Then you have voice search, which is quickly becoming a much more common method. Google will continue to perfect visual search (Google Goggles as well). Things are going to get really interesting.

The future of search is much like search’s present – just on steroids. Faster, more powerful, on a lot more interfaces, and a lot more people using them.

You can look at the tourism industry and get a feel for the problems companies of all kinds are facing in terms of social media engagement every day. I just sat in on a session at BlogWorld aimed at such companies, but the themes were much broader – how to filter though all the noise of the web to find discussions about your brand, ways to harness the social media tools that are available to us to actually get some use out of them, how to use different kinds of search engines to engage with people, etc.

When businesses think of search marketing, they tend to think about things like SEO and paid search, but there is another critical element of search – monitoring. You want to monitor your brand using search engines, and while reputation management certainly plays into this, it’s not just about reputation management, it’s about finding where people are talking about your brand and finding ways to engage with them. This not only humanizes your brand (a theme we’ve discussed a lot recently, based on various talks from the Inbound Marketing Summit), but can also help you be there for people when they need you. The conversations that are happening really dictate the solution that it is your duty to provide.

Search Marketing Isn't Just SEO and PPC

“Good listening is really no more than good search engine skills,” as Sheila Scarborough of Tourism Currents put it.

Let’s start with Twitter. This is essentially where the conversation in the session started anyway. Twitter isn’t just a place for you to tell people what you’re up to. There are plenty of practical uses for that aspect of the service too, but it’s also a search engine. A powerful search engine (even more powerful as of the last several weeks) that lets you tap into what people are saying about your brand in real time, which means you can assist them (or yourself) in real time as well.

The easiest way to do this in an effective manner is to set up a dashboard like TweetDeck, HootSuite, Seesmic, etc. – something that will give you different panels or columns to monitor searches for different keywords/phrases that pertain to your brand.

Now, you have the root of the conversation(s) in front of you. The next step is engagement, and like Ann Peavey of Seattle CVB said, personality is a tool to grab people’s attention. Have meaningful and helpful conversations with people that are already talking about your brand, whether they begin on a positive or negative note.

Next, you have traditional search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Google was the focal point, and should probably be a focal point for most businesses, considering the enormous share of the search market it retains. On an interesting side note, when they asked for a show of hands for people who use Bing, nobody raised their hands. I’m not suggesting you ignore Bing. In fact, highly recommend the opposite, especially with Windows Phone 7 making its debut, but Google is probably the best place to start. However, we’re not just talking about Google web search, it’s about using all of Google’s different search engines to find discussions (Google Video, YouTube, Blog Search, News, etc.). Don’t ignore Images either. As Scarborough and Peavey pointed out, a lot of people communicate through images. People post pictures all over the web. You might consider monitoring Google Images, Flickr, etc.

Facebook Search should also be considered part of the monitoring package, especially as the company looks to get more integrated with search in general. Searching on Facebook itself will return people, places, groups, etc. – all potential sources of conversation about your brand. Now that’s not all going to be public, and there’s not much you can do about that, but it won’t hurt to see what’s out there. Much of this is likely to become a great deal more visible thanks to things like the new deal between Facebook and Bing. I wonder how many of those people who didn’t raise their hands as Bing users will be reconsidering as a result of that.

Becky McCray (also of Tourism Currents) was talking with one of the audience members about deploying a social strategy. The fact of the matter is that there’s no silver bullet solution to this problem. A lot of it comes down to scale. How much discussion is out there about your brand on a daily basis? How much time needs to be spent to effectively engage with that all? It’s going to vary by business size, products, and other variables. One thing that is clear is that it’s worth the time, so if you need someone dedicated to this full-time, than that’s what it takes. If you need a team of people, than that’s what it takes. It’s probably a good idea to start with one person and let them build a team as needed.

Good SEO is about a lot of things- you should make sure your website is well-designed to be easy to navigate (for humans and search engines), eliminate duplicate content, intelligently internally link, convince nice people to link to you, do smart keyword research, and make sure to actually use those keywords in your meta data, page titles, and URLs. But that’s all so…easy. Tasks like these might make up the definition of search engine optimization, but SEOs who are dedicated to the practice of SEO that only considers how to play search engines are the reason that so many people badmouth SEO. It doesn’t have to be that way. SEO, for someone who cares about the long-term fate of a website and the real value of that site, is a much more inclusive concept. And the beauty of thinking of SEO in this more expansive way is: it gives you more stuff to do. You’re not confined by the boundaries of “traditional SEO”, and you can be more innovative in getting yourself- or your clients- value from a website, and at giving more value to your visitors. Everyone is happy, and when everyone likes you better, you’re going to have more success online.

There are a lot of ways to consider the value you’re offering visitors now and improve upon it, and some of them are so simple that there’s really no excuse not to integrate them into your SEO strategy. If your site is all basic-SEO-optimized up and you’re thinking “what a great job I did”, then: too bad. You’ve got so far to go, but don’t worry: this is the fun part. You always have to keep in mind all of the SEO basics, but once your site is tidy, it’s time to look into making it cool. And this is how.

1. Give the people what they want

You surely have analytics data. If you don’t, you need to get some ASAP. Determine where people are entering your site, and with which keywords, and what they’re doing when they get there, and when they’re leaving. Analyzing this data is like a little treasure hunt. Who’s getting what they want? Who isn’t? Can you figure out what you’re not offering them? You can also use the questions people are asking when they contact you to form the basis of additional information you need to be providing.

Analytics, and your own visitors’ queries, are a great place to get ideas for:

Website Optimizer tests- Test the various value propositions you’re offering to your audience, and let them tell you what they want to see.

New content for current pages- Address the unanswered questions that come up frequently!

New pages- if you offer something and it’s not apparent to people that you offer it, that…is bad. This is one of the best ways to expand your reach into a whole new group of keywords you’ve never ranked for before, and increase your website’s usefulness for your visitors as well.

2. Ask the industry

No industry is static, and that’s why you can’t optimize a site once and say done. The pace of change will vary from industry to industry, but everywhere, new terminology, trends, news, advances, and scandals will occur. It’s going to happen, and you need to make sure you stay knowledgeable about it in order to update your keywords and content to stay relevant.

Talk to the client- If you’re working for a client website rather than your own industry, it’s important to touch base frequently about what’s going on, and how those occurrences can be integrated into your site content.

Add an industry events calendar to your site- Especially if you, or your client, attend events frequently, you can list industry events and mention your attendance, which is fantastic both because it tends to be easy to rank for conference and event names, exposing you to a large industry audience for branding purposes, and because it lets people know they can find you there for personal interaction.

Add an industry news section to your site- This is a great way, if you are not in the industry of the site you’re optimizing, to keep apprised of what’s going on and identify new areas for keyword and content targeting. It’s also useful, if you just write small summaries of each news item, as a way to integrate a variety of relevant industry terms onto your site.

3. Give people a chance to interact

Social media etc. etc. etc. – there are a ton of ways to interact with your audience now. Pick a social media platform or two that you can be dedicated to, let people tell you what they want, and be willing to respond by giving it to them or telling them why you have a better alternative.

4. Don’t forget your roots

Local SEO- If you’re a business with a local presence- whether you’re targeting a nationwide or worldwide audience or not- it’s usually silly to ignore your hometown business. They’re right there. Local SEO isn’t just the same as more widely-targeted SEO efforts, but it can be done in conjunction with them, and a lot of the things you can do- from opening a Google Local Business center account to integrating local keywords and an address on your site- are so straightforward it will probably cost you more to ignore them than execute them.

The SEO game is never over: there’s always a way to be better, and the key to long-term success is to keep reaching for it.

As you know full well, the search industry is constantly changing, and that means SEOs and businesses must adapt. This is always made abundantly clear at the change of each year as the previous year is reflected upon, and predictions about trends in the upcoming year are discussed. SEOs know that adaptation and ongoing education are crucial. The problem is that businesses don’t always understand just how much the search landscape actually does change. This can present a whole different set of challenges for both the small business and the professional SEO.

What are some SEO tactics you’ve had a hard time convincing clients to employ?

Searching for Profit founder Amanda Watlington recently discussed some arising trends in the search industry and how understanding the changing search landscape is of vital importance. One example of change is the possible inclusion of site speed as a ranking factor in Google. Matt Cutts dropped that bomb a couple months ago, and while many welcome it, a lot are dreading it.

For one, businesses and clients of SEOs simply may not be so eager to put forth the time and money required to make the necessary adjustments to their sites to optimize for speed, although it is clearly in the best interest of the customer’s experience anyway.

Another challenge, as Watlington mentions, is personalized search. Companies don’t always get that not everybody is necessarily going to see the same search results for any given query, and it can sometimes be difficult for SEOs to convince them that this is the case.

Although things appear to be looking up, budgets have been tight, and businesses are demanding better results for their bucks, but they are not always aware of the big picture, which is why it is up to the hired SEO professional to educate them as best they can, and for other businesses to educate themselves.

Luckily, there are plenty of industry resources freely available on the web. After all, you’ve probably read about the very tactics you have in mind there yourself. SEOs should find instances to back up their case to convince stubborn clients. Some of them are just hung up on outdated trends. Obviously this can make it hard to produce the results they are after.

“The evolution has been slow, and I don’t think we’ve helped it as much as we could,” Watlington says of companies’ understanding of SEO trends.

If you are the client of an SEO or a business trying to get things done yourself, don’t stay hung up on old tactics that might be outdated. At this point, these are some of the things you should keep in mind:

- Site Speed (it’s going to matter, so don’t ignore it…here are some things to consider)
- Personalized Search (Not everyone is going to see the same Google results)
- Universal Search (Showing up here requires attention to different indexes)
- Real-Tme Search (look for more evolution in this area)
- Changes in Local (there are frequently tweaks made by Google here)
- Some things do stay the same (things like reputable links will always be in style)
- Most importantly, stay informed (just keep up with the latest in industry developments)

As Watlington notes in the interview, metrics are very important, and there has been a great deal of focus on them in the industry in recent years. New metrics come about, just as new tools do. Metrics can help illustrate the bigger picture, custom-fit to a particular organizations goals.

At SES Chicago, there was an interesting session in which a group of search marketing professionals debated the issue of which is better between PPC and SEO. Participants included Dave Naylor, Chirstine Churchill, Michael Gray, and Karen Weber, and Rand Fishkin.

Does PPC have more benefits than SEO? Comment here.

Chruchill pointed to a study from Engine Ready on conversion rates by source of traffic (PPC vs organic). The study found:

- Conversion rates: PPC just barely beat SEO
- Average Order Value: Paid won
- Average time on site: Paid won

She gave the following as advantages of PPC:

Christine Churchill- Gives immediate online presence

- Have a new site? Have ads in an hour
- Start getting ROI sooner
- No ramp up time
- Great for seasonal items or time sensitive promotions
- Great for testing
- Easily test effectiveness of new marketing message or site design change
- Quickly gather feedback
- Regulate traffic volume
- Sales pipeline empty? Use PPC to push traffic
- Overloaded? Pause campaigns or cut back spend
- Have limited sales season? Saturate market while demand is high

“PPC is very agile. It’s also has targeting advantages,” said Churchill.

For targeting, she says PPC provides opportunity for high visibility in multiple channels (search engines, content sites, mobile phones), expands results beyond search results, and gives you control over placement on SERPs and better control over landing page/message.

It’s often easier to sell PPC to management because the concept is similar to traditional advertising, and provides for direct accountability. It’s easy to track measures of success. It’s an effective way to drive qualified traffic to your site, and it allows you to expand your opportunities.

Karen Weber Weber says the top five reasons why “PPC rules,” are: speed, flexibility, it’s unlimited, it’s goal-driven, and it’s controllable. You can quickly manipulate keywords to those that drive conversions, you can quickly change bid prices, and you can quickly get in and out of the market. You can turn your campaign on and off, and change ad copy, keywords, etc. You can target a much wider range of keywords, adhere to a budget, and have an immediate impact on sales.

Fishkin pointed out that PPC gets 10% of clicks, but 90% of spend. He said SEO is more challenging and less controllable, but the spend is there and the fact that people click organic results.

Gray said he believes that PPC could make SEO better, but Google is banning people now, so it makes things more challenging. Naylor said he believes SEO is more “open.” Weber and Fishkin both said they would outsource PPC over SEO.

Michael Gray Gray said it’s important to get in the top during the early part of the research phase, especially since Google is personalizing results for everyone now. Churchill noted that Google’s personalization is a better argument for PPC. Like iEntry CEO Rich Ord recently noted, the addition of personalized results could “make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords.”

Another point was brought up as we recently discussed – that the search engines are pushing organic listings down with mixed media (blended, universal) results.

Certainly there are many advantages to both PPC and SEO, and they can compliment one another. Actually, a recent study from a couple of NYU Stern professors found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked.

Which do you think is more important – SEO or PPC?

Share your thoughts here.