This part of the session was covered by Neil Stickells from Steak, who had some interesting experiences arising from working with a large online supermarket. 

Size doesn’t matter: 
Algorithms assess the quality of sites in the same way, whether they are a few pages or a couple of million – the same principles work, and there are no apparent scale effects. Just because you are a large well-known company, you still have to do the work! The search engines don’t ‘know who you are’ and rank accordingly. 

Best practice, red tape, internal politics and lack of resource:
So, whether large or small – follow best practice, and look out for the main problems of red tape, internal politics and lack of resource.  Neill experienced  problems getting buy-in, the company had previously just used robots to no-follow; he had to get people to understand what they needed to be doing and run seo campaigns. One of their first goals was to cut ppc – this is often a stated goal – but funnily enough, once good natural results start coming in, they often don’t want to then switch off PPC. 

Define your objectives:
What are you trying to do? Be clear about what you are being judged on in six months or a year.

Manage expectations:
Really manage these very closely and on an on-going basis. You will always be getting directors asking where the rankings are – you have to continually be pointing out that this takes time, and not just four weeks. 

Analytics:
It took about fourteen months to get this working properly - start work on your analytics as soon as possible – nearly all clients will have their analytics in a mess. Crucial to this is understanding the impact of marketing campaigns running alongside – you have to know when TV, print and radio campaigns might be running – understand what the spikes might be resulting from. It can take about twelve to fourteen months to get going – be as confident as you can be in the data – you need to be able to stand in front of management and state categorically that ‘we have x amount of revenue from search.’ He was nine or ten months in –thought he had it covered and then odd data started appearing – and they almost had to start again. You have to be able to convince people your data are correct; they will be picking!

Benchmark straightway:
Get an immediate record of PageRank, keyword rankings, numbers of pages indexed. PageRank – might be a dirty word, but is probably a concept the CEO vaguely understands and can look at.  Also benchmark competitors - how performing against a particular competitor.

Don’t work on your own:
You need to talk to all the other teams: sales, marketing, PR, content writers.

Run search clinics:
Tell people ‘we are here’ for an hour every first Monday of the month. People might not want to ask questions via email, but will be happier about asking face to face.

Write awareness documents: 
Make it clear what you are doing.

Make cups of tea:
Don’t keep asking IT to do things, make them cups of tea and talk to them about their cars, partners, leisure activities. Talk about the weather and your holidays.  

Optimising a huge site can seem overwhelming, but often they just use a handful of templates, and you can easily roll out some great changes with a little bit of application.

Prioritise all your recommendations:
Assign a value to each one – whether it’s revenue or not – if it has such a value then it is more likely to be included.

Build tools:
Bear in mind what happens to data that goes into the tools. Who owns it? Where is it kept?
Or, use Raven, Copyscape, Socialmeter, for example. 

Keyword research:
Internal search, what are they looking for? This helps with the structure of site.

Link analysis and keyword rankings:
Most agencies have their own, or you can use third party ones such as: Interwebbing, WM console, Firefox: all help with spotting errors very quickly

Reporting is difficult:
Tailor by who you present it to - keep brief, keep relevant, on a monthly basis, ensure you are reporting on the KPIs agreed.

Hold quarterly reviews: 
Don’t drown people so they lose interest. Maintain your profile and those of others – make sure you celebrate successes – let everyone know. Target the keyword you know the CEO checks on every Monday morning. One of the best things is when you get an email that just says: “Google dishwashers!” 

Brand control:
When working on sites that have multiple domain names, with the right approach, you can fill the front page with all these domain names.

Usability:
If your site is useable you can make it easier to convert, keep the traffic coming in. Some sites can make it phenomenally difficult for their customers.

It can be hard work:
It can be frustrating, but if you get it right the results make it really worthwhile.

Q&As:

• What if your client wants to use linking techniques that will get them up there fast using dubious practices? Ask, ‘how important is their domain name, as opposed to the keyword ranking?’
• What do you report on internally?  Pages indexed and inbound links; this will impact on long tailed-traffic, to anticipate call from client. Don’t worry about numbers of people ’through the door,’  it’s more about how many put money in the bank – ie the quality. 
• For smaller businesses, with less budget, find niches where people search ten times a day, on the long-tail search – how to make the page look that people will land on when they are there, card in hand. They won’t do a price comparison; you’ve already done it; make sure you have compared prices and that you are the cheapest – if not the cheapest, then the best.. 
• Content: Produce meaningful and worthy content on the site. A travel company can support its content with destination guides – measure the impact of these, see how traffic works on these pages and look at the natural links coming in. Do advice on traveling when disabled. Identify opportunities and look at what niche groups are out there… 

 And finally…

• Content is the prince, links are king.  This is what we all think. Except that there was one case where someone from a company was talking to Dave Naylor about their new site and said that it had only taken a week to rank extremely well for a particular keyword, and their site had no links…  They  don’t know how happened  - but they did put fifteen hundred pages of content on flooring up on the site.
• Try running competitions to create content – ie for a phone company, ‘tell us what you love about your phone.’ However, you have to balance this with understanding about managing control. (Which was very well covered in another session.)