What qualifies a website as a mega site? According to Derrick Wheeler, the Senior SEO Architect at Microsoft, a mega website is a large, complicated site in which the content is generated by multiple business units in many different countries and languages.

As he explains to WebProNews, mega SEO can be very challenging, but there are a few important aspects that people should remember when doing it. For starters, while content is king in many areas, it is not king in mega SEO. Wheeler says that structure is king with mega SEO.

“Without structure, your content won’t even be discovered,” he points out.

Crawl efficiency is another big factor with mega SEO. SEOs need to make their website as efficient as possible for crawling and indexing.

Finding and eliminating outdated content is also a large part of mega SEO. For Microsoft specifically, its IT department helped determine which content was old and whether or not it should be removed. From this exercise alone, Microsoft was able to remove 1-2 million unnecessary urls from their website.

In addition, there is the international element of mega SEO that is a challenge. It can be very difficult for countries to manage their SEO when the content is published to various places on a website. Although an international url policy helps this issue to an extent, there are still challenges with multiple content management systems.

“With mega SEO, it’s about making small strides over time… that grouped together, they really have a big impact,” says Wheeler.

Because mega SEO can be so difficult, Wheeler wrote an oath that he recommends SEOs read everyday. By reading it, he hopes SEOs will feel better about their SEO efforts.