Every corporation large enough to have an IT department has had search engine optimization problems at one point or another. Well, at least every corporation that I’ve dealt with. And dealing with these issues sometimes requires the diplomatic skills of Henry Kissinger, the technical skills of Bill Gates, the persuasion skills of P.T. Barnum and the people skills of Barack Obama. If you’re in that position, here are some tips for the successful care and feeding of IT people.

Back when I first started doing natural optimization, this job always fell to the IT department. Most of the time, the marketing department wasn’t even involved, and advertising didn’t even know what search was. So I worked with the geeks. So, these IT guys were in charge of keeping the Website running, making sure that everyone’s e-mail worked, keeping viruses out of the system, evaluating and purchasing new hardware and software, teaching the CEO how to use a mouse (or his secretary how to print out e-mails so the CEO could read them) and initiating world peace. As you can imagine, sometimes search engine optimization would get pushed to the back burner.

At one large corporation where I was hired to do some consulting, it took us almost two years to get meta tags changed (back when that was a big deal). For two years, I was paid to be a consultant who said the same thing over and over again. Change the meta tags to my suggestions. This was early in my career and I had little to no persuasive skills, so it just sat. Finally, one day the tags were changed. Traffic to the site increased by more than 100% and I was a hero. I got my mojo then. IT wanted to hear from me.

There’s a lesson to be learned in that story that applies even today when dealing with IT departments. The lesson is, there is more persuasion in small (and large) victories than in all the mandates, dictates, pleadings, impassioned speeches or bribes in the world. If you can show a small step of progress, you will more than likely win over the folks in charge of IT.

But these days, the IT problem is more masked. Most of the time the marketing department is calling the shots. The IT department is there to “serve” the marketing department. Many times this does not make the IT department happy. In some organizations this can lead to passive-aggressive tactics by IT that can actually doom a natural search engine optimization program rather quickly. The biggest of these is what one of my clients affectionately refers to as “17″ in reference to the 17^th letter of the alphabet. The Q, or queue, as it is referred to can be the lowest level of hell for all search engine optimization requests. These requests get pushed back for more “mission critical” projects, like installing a network to play Quake or watching hours of StrongBad at Homestarrunner.com. Only a directive from the C-level suite can push these through. Thus the need for internal champions.

I’ve heard a lot of SEOs talk about internal champions, and I’ve been one of them. But when dealing with an overly passive-aggressive (or merely insanely overworked) IT department, these individuals with clout can be the messiah or an otherwise doomed search engine optimization initiative. However, cramming things down the throats of IT should be used sparingly. My suggestion, get an internal champion that works in IT.

This part of SEO is all about relationships. I don’t care how much you know about 301 redirects, keyword density, Google’s algorithm, etc. If you can’t get the IT guys to like you, you are screwed. They control the Web site. Many times they don’t like the marketing people who you are reporting too. You must make friends in IT – take a geek to happy hour, buy a guy a Monty Python DVD. Just check in on other IT projects and offer a shoulder to cry on or a place to vent. But if you become friends with IT, the benefits are countless. This is a tactic the best marketing managers know, and the mediocre ones ignore. You are only as good as your IT connections when it comes to search engine optimization in a large organization.

Tony Wright is founder & CEO of WrightIMC. The Industrial Strength column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

Recently, those that are close to me have noticed a new obsession.  I’ve always been tethered to my Blackberry reading e-mails, twitter, blogs and other online fodder as I’m on the road (and, I shouldn’t admit, while driving – watch out for me on the road). But recently I’ve found a new item to look at. I’m obsessed with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I type in “djia” into Google on my mobile phone probably  4-5 times an hour when I’m on the road and more when I’m in the office on my computer.

Basically, I love a good drama, and Dow Jones Industrial Average has provided that drama in the last few weeks – although this story definitely has more tangible implications than the flicks you catch on a Friday night at the local multi-plex. And this economy will definitely affect search, but if history is any indication, not in the way you think it might.

Back in 2003, the economy was depressed. Granted, the markets were not  in as much turmoil then as they are now. I knew that my bank would be there tomorrow and would have the same name as it did yesterday. Charts for the Dow didn’t resemble the topography of the Grand Canyon. And search marketing – especially in large companies, was growing by leaps and bounds.

Let’s face some cold-hard facts. Search marketing at its core is not sexy. We don’t have sexy graphics or witty television commercials with talking animals. We have text. – a 25 character headline and two 35 character description lines in PPC and a title tag of 72 characters or less on the natural side.  When money is flowing, people move to the sexy side of things. But when things get tight, corporations tend to spend on things they know make them money in the short term. Search makes corporations money.

Forget branding. Forget audience interaction. Search marketing hits consumers at the point of the buying cycle where they are opening their wallets and making a purchase. Consumers purchase items during down times. In down times, consumers look for deals. The best deals in the world are found online. And the best way to find those deals is through search. Therefore, companies both large and small will shift dollars from branding initiatives into search during a down economy.

So, amongst the doom and gloom search marketers should be celebrating – but cautiously. Yep, there’s a down side, and a significant one at that.

The symbiotic relationship between branding and search marketing is not often cited except by Google reps trying to sell display ads, but it does exist. Branding drives search volume. Despite the fact that we search marketers would love to claim that search can affect brand awareness (I’m not saying it can’t), television, print and online display do a much better job in this arena. But, brand awareness translates into search volume.

I’ve seen this happen countless times. When my client runs a string of television ads, our search campaigns (especially branded campaigns) perform through the roof.  When the branding dollars dry up, or better yet are shifted in search marketing programs, the volume of search traffic has a tendency to go down. And if this happens, the inventory in paid search is such that you can’t spend the budget allotted to you without dipping into questionable contextual programs that don’t perform much better than television or display or the other places where the money was shifted from in the first place.

So my advice for search marketers during this time? Don’t get too greedy with the proposed budgets. The worst thing that can happen is that you can’t spend the money effectively because of a drop in search volume. Encourage brand managers not to ignore the majority of the buying funnel to concentrate on the end for short-term gains. It may sound like I’m advocating short-changing search. I’m not, I’m looking at the big picture. When this economy straightens itself out, search will most likely have an even larger share of the pie once again. But in order to keep the pie at a reasonable size, we must be vigilant to keep the entire funnel happy. It’s better for us as search marketers to have a reasonable share of a larger pie than the lion’s share a small pie. Remember that next time budget meetings come about and someone is talking about getting rid of the entire television or radio budget.

I’m off to check the Dow on my phone now. Until next time.

Tony Wright is founder & CEO of WrightIMC. The Industrial Strength column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

I always think of an armada of ships when I look at a franchised company. You’ve got a large battleship, directing the path of the smaller craft—yet the smaller craft must navigate on their own, especially when the instructions from the battleship don’t make sense. And oftentimes, because the franchisees are busy navigating their own murky waterways, they can fail to see the logic behind the battleship’s directions and forge their own paths, sometimes to disastrous effect.

Creating search engine marketing strategies for franchised companies is some of the most challenging work I’ve done in my career—and also some of the most rewarding. In this column, I’ll outline some lessons learned when working with franchisees and at the corporate level of the franchise itself.

Rule #1: A heavy hand at the beginning saves heartache down the road. The franchisees have already thought about search engine marketing. Most likely, some of them are already doing some form of search engine marketing with local firms or on their own. For some reason, franchisees seem to fall victim to the numerous “snake oil salesmen” in our industry more than the average business owner.

It is important at the beginning to set firm rules about what franchisees can and cannot do with their own sites in terms of search engine marketing. This is especially true if each individual franchise site resides on the main domain of the company. There is damage that can be done to everyone if one franchisee breaks the rules. A franchisee using disreputable SEO tactics can damage an entire domain, so it’s best to nip the problem before it starts.

In PPC, setting limitations on the types of keywords that can be bid upon by franchisees, or better yet creating a central PPC campaign that meets the needs of the franchisees. There are a number of ways a centeralized campaign can work, including co-op dollars from different regions, etc. Don’t be afraid to get creative to make this work, as it will save tons of time and frustration down the road.

Rule #2: You can’t please all the people all the time – pick a strategy and stick with it. In the course of planning a search engine marketing program for a franchised company, you will come across challenges from everywhere. Every franchisee is, for good reason, protecting their own turf. They want to make sure that the tactics employed will benefit them. Many times, it is a challenge to please everyone. And the simple fact is, if you do please everyone, you probably have a mediocre program that isn’t doing anyone any good.

Whether you plan to conduct a top-down program where all of the search marketing comes from corporate, or you plan on implementing a best practices program where each franchisee is given a set of guidelines and rules and sent off to implement the tactics by themselves, the result will be the same. Someone is going to be pissed off. Typical problems include geographic skirmishes (who gets the customers that are equal to two franchisees), problems with restrictive rules (why can’t I bid on the company name for just my store?), accusations of favoritism among franchisees and an overall disagreement with the SEM strategy (too aggressive vs. not aggressive enough).

The bottom line is that you need to create a comprehensive strategy and act upon it. I’ve worked with some franchised companies who are so scared of their franchisees that they fail to put a program in place at all – and that hurts everyone.

One best practice is to create a beta group of franchisees and test some programs there. Then, you have data to show the others when you launch systemwide. While this tactic can bring its own headaches, it seems to alleviate some problems others have, especially if the franchisees picked for the beta are some of the more successful in the program.

Rule #3: You have limited resources. Realize this and plan accordingly. No matter how many stores your franchise has, you have limited resources. Much of the search engine marketing for franchises takes place in the local search arena. Local search, by its nature, is more time consuming than traditional search. There are more moving parts in local search – just keeping up with the localities and all of the data collection points (IYPs, directories, aggregators, etc.) is a full time job. Doing that for 1000+ stores could require a full staff, which probably wouldn’t be profitable for anyone in the long run. The secret is to create processes whereby the stores can help themselves, but also control is maintained at the top. This is tricky, but not impossible. The secret is a well-thought out road map at the beginning of the project. Centralized campaigns can be a good thing, but if you don’t have the resources to run them, they quickly become nightmares that make everyone mad.

Creating a search engine marketing program for a franchise system is challenging, but the rewards can be great for everyone involved if done correctly.

Tony Wright, CEO and Founder of WrightIMC has spent his career helping businesses of all sizes be profitable on the Web. He serves as President of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Search Marketing Association. His blog is at www.shavingoccam.com. The Industrial Strength column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

One of the easiest things to do in SEO is to poke holes in someone else’s SEO strategy. I proudly admit to having done this on countless occasions when someone asks me to look at their site and give my “expert opinion.” It’s very easy to take a look at the code for a few seconds, spout off about 10 things that haven’t been done on the site, impress the potential client with my knowledge of alt tags, esoteric ranking methodologies or meta tag knowledge and then ride off in the sunset. The potential client looks at me like I am the SEO cowboy who promises to save the day if you just ask. I’ll come riding in with my white hat and algorithmic silver bullets and put you on top of the SERPs, banishing your enemies to Google hell.

The reality of the situation is much more complex. Working with large corporations brings its own set of challenges that can rarely be ascertained during a 10 minute code review or even an in-depth SEO audit. The simple problems uncovered in a quick site review are rarely the fault of an inept SEO (well, sometimes it happens) but are more likely attributed to a burgeoning organization with long to-do lists, underappreciated and overworked staff and a lack of understanding of the potential impact small changes can have on a large SEO program.

Here’s how it happens: the brand manager comes through door touting the latest and greatest search engine un-friendly content management system that creates all pages in wordless flash and complex URLs that can only be decoded by NASA that they saw at their booze filled conference in Vegas. The in-house SEO team tries to protest but this app is so “cool” the warnings are met with indifference. The IT department loves the system because the sales rep bought them doughnuts and promised them they wouldn’t have to do any work. And the VP is too worried about his constantly devaluing stock portfolio to worry about something as trivial as a content management system. We all know how this story ends. Usually with me getting a gig as an outside consultant.

From a natural search point of view, most large corporations get by on their brand. The companies usually have incredible off-the-page SEO assets that go to waste because of simple on-the-page faux-pas committed by overeager IT or marketing staffs in the so-called interest of the brand. And the small guys (including the SEO consultants that concentrate on small and medium sized businesses) salivate over the linkjuice and think “man, if I just had a third of that, think what I could do.”

The truth is, with the amount of link equity attributed to the average Fortune 500, there is a lot you can do with simple on-page fixes. The problem is, at companies that large, there is no such thing as a simple on-page fix. Back in the early years, it once took me almost two years to get a title tag change that was approved by everyone. Once the fix was made, the results were incredibly lucrative, but getting that change cost time, money and sweat that would never be necessary in a smaller organization.

So, when working with a large organization, it’s important to remember that what is on the surface isn’t always what is underneath. If you are responsible for search marketing in a large corporation, your responsibility is as much about managing internal expectations and resources as it is about writing title tags and optimized content. If you are an agency working with a large corporation, your job is about providing an outside voice that, sometimes, can be heard better than the voices inside the organization.

As search gains a seat at the “big kids” table of marketing, we are seeing many of these problems become less pronounced. IT and marketing are working together better. In many organizations, a specialized search team has been created that straddles both the IT and marketing departments. The time is coming when large organizations will become nimble enough to implement the necessary on-page changes that will skyrocket their search presences. Yes, that day is coming. And these policy changes are not only affecting search, but entire organizations. And in the coming months I’ll be discussing many of these changes. I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride.

Tony Wright, CEO and Founder of WrightIMC has spent his career helping businesses of all sizes be profitable on the Web. He serves as President of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Search Marketing Association. His blog is at www.shavingoccam.com. The Industrial Strength column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.