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I'm at Search Engine Strategies at the Hilton Hotel here in New York for the next 4 days and I spent part of this morning at the In House: Big SEO Session - here's my notes and impressions:

Marketing notes:
In House: Big SEO
How do you cope with doing search engine optimization for a company with tens of divisions, hundreds of products, thousands of web pages and seemingly no way to bring order to the chaos? Where do you begin with the SEO process? This panel looks at problems and solutions unique to those running big sites or from big companies and brands.

Moderator:
Jeffrey K. Rohrs, President, Optiem, LLC
Speakers:
Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International
Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times / About.com
Q&A Speakers:
Brendan Hart, Director of Customer Acquisition, National Geographic
Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Program Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company

People should use several tools for SEO keyword research, especially when your getting much more traffic for certain keywords in your server logs than the keyword tools show as total demand for those keywords. And often, its' best to aggregate the data in several keyword tools such as Word Tracker, Keyword Discovery and Hitwise, and then estimate, for that - what the demand for a keyword phrase is.

The futher you get from the United States, the more inaccurate the keyword data from free and paid keyword research tools become - and that makes it harder to do good keyword research internationally - especially for large companies that now are beginning to buy into SEO.

Bill Hunt of Global Strategies mentioned that SEO work is harder to evaluate since it's usually project based and you need to present data that shows a clear benefit (like sales in one part of a site where SEO work was done increased considerably to another where SEO was not done, as an example).

Marshall Simmonds mentioned that the New York Times used to get about 14% of it's traffic from Search Engines; now it's up to 22% and he's striving to bring the NYT up to 30% of total traffic from Search Engines, which is a good place to be for a publisher.

Brendan Hart of National Geographic, mentioned that his company gets 40%-50% of it's total traffic from Search Engines but it's a moving target and varies from day to day.

Tanya Vaughn of HP spoke about finding pages of HP that aren't doing well and optimizing them by adding content and measuring the differences.

Most of the companies represented at this session were running Omniture as their analytics solution.

Bill Hunt brought up that Search is going in 2 directions now - high end C level executives will see the value of search optimization and wonder why content is not optimized and SEO certified at the point of conception while mid level managers are by passing corporate directives and building mini-sites that are optimized for SEO but which would be taken down by Corporate if they talked about the success of the mini-sites.

Glad to be at a conference where you can get a sense of direction of where Search is going.