That means giving those involved access to the content systems, as well as knowing the correct keywords to target. "For me to run down the hallway and tell an editor, 'hey, you need to edit this H1 tag,'" doesn't do any good if the field doesn't exist or the editor doesn't have access to the system, he says.

Any change in the content management system at MSN can influence "tens of millions of pages" worldwide -- and what works in the United States might not work in the United Kingdom. The SEO team must work with the content management group, so everyone understands the best practices for optimizing the content.

MSN's content includes everything from video galleries to articles on health. The SEO team has tools to crawl MSN sites and rate them for optimization. Globally, five people lead the group, including Forrester in North America, three in the United Kingdom and another in Tokyo.

The SEO team in North America often gets tapped to optimize sites across Microsoft, so Forrester will push the strategy to stretch companywide. And while MSN doesn't support Bing, it does provide SEO guidance for some of the content pulled into the network.

"Videos will become a larger component of Bing," Forrester says.

The changes to the strategy mean templates for Web pages on all content must meet SEO compliance. It also means fundamental best practices are in place for title tags and meta-descriptions, and navigation links aren't buried in JavaScript.

The strategy aims to set standards for internal divisions and third-party companies that provide MSN Web content, so when Microsoft gets video, articles and rich media in Flash and Silverlight, it can use the content across its properties with little effort. "We have a finite number of resources to apply to producing the content," Forrester says. "Making sure the content coming in is optimized... makes it easier to do the maximum amount of work with a limited number of resources."

Each Microsoft division also has what Forrester calls an "SEO champ," an employee who "sits in the channel" and becomes the conduit between Forrester's team and the division for any conversations on SEO.

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