Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Program Manager HP

I’m currently at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City which is a great conference for search professionals.  The first session I attended this morning was In-House: Big SEO – meaning Search Engine Optimization for large companies with complex web sites.  I sat on a panel for this session where two SEO veterans, Marshall Simmonds of Define Search Strategies and Bill Hunt of Global Strategies International, presented some in-house tactics and strategies for large companies.  Then it was opened to Q&A where Brendan Hart, Director of Customer Acquisition at Reader’s Digest/National Geographic and I both joined in to share our experiences, challenges and successes with in-house SEO for a large company.

The room was packed with over 250 attendees which surprised me for the first session of a 4-day conference.  But when I think about it and my experience with SEO for a complex site, I can definitely see the draw as I’d have attended this very session if not on the panel.  There were great questions from the audience.  One person asked how we create a cost benefit analysis of infrastructure changes that aren’t tied to keywords (where missed opportunities are easier to quantify).  That truly is a challenge as it’s difficult to say what the net impact will be:  Will it increase the number of pages indexed?  If so, by how many?  And what additional traffic will those additional pages bring to the site?  Will that traffic drive revenue?  How much?  Many of these questions require assumptions to quantify the possible ROI.  There was also a question by the moderator as to whether SEOs were held to a higher requirement of proving an ROI before being granted additional budgets and IT support.  I think any of us would prepare such an analysis if possible but with SEO it really is hard to quantify – we just know these best practices will make a positive impact.  The engines tell us that much – and they really don’t share a lot when it comes to SEO.  

But speaking of engines sharing with regard to SEO, I attended the Google Webmaster Central session over lunch.  It was a Q&A for folks to ask questions about how to best utilize the Google Webmaster Central tools but, again, some great questions were asked.  One question was whether search engines will ever be able to read Flash.  Danny Sullivan, conference chair, summed it up with a basic “no” and Vanessa Fox of Google’s Webmaster Central expanded to say that search engines may always be limited to indexing text so the best practice is still to include relevant, important text on the page to complement the flash.  Also, someone asked my holy grail question for international SEO – when will Google be able to tell if content is intended for a specific country if the company is not using TLDs (top level domains) by country and not physically hosting content in that country.  The answer hadn’t changed from what I blogged about yesterday (International Web Content and Search Engines) – it’s a priority and Google is looking at other things they can do to identify a target country like looking at sub-domains and/or directories.  But, I was extremely happy to hear someone else ask the question and the answer be addressed in front of a crowd of well over 300 people.  The next questions was also about top level country domains – lots of interest here so I expect we’ll see some enhancements from Google.  There were a couple of other great questions about duplicate content created by multiple languages/countries and URLs with parameters being indexed.  Looking forward to more in-depth discussion of these topics in the Duplicate Content session on Wednesday.

The last session I attended today was In-house: Building the Team.  This was also a great session.  There were a lot of perspectives on building quality search teams.  Whether you hire fresh graduates, musicians or engineers most agreed on one common requirement: passion.  It may sound cliché but I really think passion is what has driven this industry to what it is today (well that and the ROI!).  Most SEMs (including SEOs) are self-taught – they became interested and they consumed as much as they could to learn the field.  That is how I got started 4 years ago and I’m still learning it and loving it today.  It was also interesting to see how many companies, while building in-house search teams, are building them in a virtual manner – meaning oftentimes the team members don’t report to one manager but are spread across the organization.  I think that’s fairly common for large companies with multiple product lines and customer segments as the search expert needs to be an expert on the particular division or business they support within the company. 

Jessica Bowman from Business.com was there to talk about the SEO team she’d built and she had, I thought, a pretty realistic view of search talent.  Her view was that it was wise for companies to have backup plans for if (or more likely when) someone left a search job and to accept that their in-house search experts might have side search jobs.  She said she not only does not preclude her staff from doing this but practically encourages it as it further hones their skill sets at no cost to the company.  I definitely agree with this as I recently created search engine site maps for my husband’s small business, Balihoo, and it helped me more fully understand the site maps protocol.

Finally, I wrapped up the day’s events attending the SEMPO meeting.  It was great to hear about the progress SEMPO has made with the global, research and institute initiatives as well as the plans that are in the works for 2007.  They’ve done an excellent job in creating value for their members.