There’s a good article at ClickZ on the sticky situation of corporate politics and SEO for bigger companies. “When Corporate Politics and SEO Collide“. It emphasizes the importance of the unique communication needs of a bigger company with interdepartmental participants affected by a SEO project. Project management skills are as important as SEO implementation skills.

This sentiment is reinforced by Stuntdubl’s post: “The best SEOs are really a culmination of a variety of very diverse skills brought together to improve a business or organization’s marketing performance in the online arena. Top SEO’s are “project managers” and meta-webmasters”.

How true. Just yesterday I was meeting with a client that’s a fairly large organization who’s webmaster left a bit of unintended “disinformation” behind. We’re speaking with/educating various department heads now to bring everyone together and refocus on strategy and objectives rather than the implementation of tactics “because the competition is doing it” or “because our webmaster said that’s what we should do”. Rankings are one small step to the real goals of improved brand visibility and increased sales.

MarketingProfs has a good article about that: The Myth of Rankings: Beyond Search Engine Optimization. “A consistent problem with the “ranking-centric” mindset is that it doesn’t reflect a powerful rationale for getting involved in SEO. Where is the true business case? What tangible results are desired?”

Business, marketing, communication, project management, technical skills (coding and often server side), copy writing, web design, research, analytics and even public relations on occasion. All these skills are what make up a good SEO. These are important skills for any size optimization project, but particularly with larger companies and corporate SEO projects.