Website Marketing Articles Discuss Big SEO: Automate Or Die Trying in the vBulletin SEO Tips and SEO Questions forums; If you are one of the growing numbers of in-house SEOs working on larger web sites, things can get a bit "scratch-your-head, where-do-I-start" difficult. If you're managing tens of millions ...

If you are one of the growing numbers of in-house SEOs working on larger web sites, things can get a bit "scratch-your-head, where-do-I-start" difficult. If you're managing tens of millions of pages, or even tens of thousands of pages, there's no doubt you need to automate things. Even those working on smaller sites that produce a large volume of unique content each month could benefit from automation.

This doesn't mean buying some "search optimization software," though. Rather, it entails developing a completely holistic view of the entire SEO process, including your:

• Search optimization efforts
• Corporate goals
• Projected ROI for every step along the way
• Timelines
• In-house programming capacity and more than one glance at your CMS (content management system)

In the end, you're looking for the best way to cover the basics of on-page optimization, while being able to manage this effort across those millions of pages.
Some very quick math shows why you must go down this road:
Time to optimize one page = 4 minutes (writing unique tags, updating code, publishing the page, etc.)
Number of pages = 500,000
Number of hours needed = 33,333 or 1,389 days (3.8 years)
Not that this is a hard thing to wrap our heads around, but it's obviously clear that manually touching this volume of pages is unrealistic.
So, what to do?
Build some proprietary tools
Many may cringe at this idea, and for good reason. Building your own tool set to manage all your optimization needs is no simple task. You'll need to cover items like:

• A way to automate the insertion of meta tag data based on the actual content of a given page
• A way to manually adjust any one page
• A way to test the system against pre-defined rules to give you a red light/green light report to help find and drill into any problem areas

Here are some steps to help you tackle the bigger points:
Step 1: How big is this site, anyway? You'll need a realistic picture of how large the site is currently, and it's projected growth over the next few months or so. Break this out by folders or subdomains, however the site is naturally divided.
Step 2 What matters to you? Decide what should be covered with your basic on-page optimization. I cover things like the...

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