Optimizing a website that has tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dynamically generated pages, requires thinking differently says Stephan Spencer is founder and president of Netconcepts. Old school SEO, where you assign each page a keyword theme based on keyword research and hand-craft a title tag, H1 tag and intro copy, then figure out the best internal links to send to the page, just doesn't scale with big sites, wrote Spencer in Search Engine Land Web site.

Spencer has a number of things to tell SEO enthusiasts...

It's essential that you focus your SEO efforts in such a way that the effects will cascade through your site. For example, come up with "recipes" for optimized titles for product pages, for category pages, for articles, etc.-yet allowing for those recipes to be overridden with a hand-crafted title tag when required. Getting the title tag right will make a big difference.

Don't stop at the title tag; optimize the entire HTML template. Use SEO best practices: 1) separate out the content layer from the presentation layer; 2) make sure you're using semantic markup; 3) employ heading tags (e.g. H1, H2) when appropriate; 4) cut the bloat out of the template; 5) make sure you're not using the same meta description and meta keywords across the whole template. Make that template really hum.

Then move on to your URLs. Granted URLs are harder to optimize, but it's usually worth the effort. Particularly if your URLs have more than a couple parameters (i.e. more than two equals signs). It's been our experience that static URLs perform better in the engines. As a bonus, such URLs look nicer to users so they tend to garner more links too. Ideally you should go for keyword URLs.

Another thing that decreases your percentage of "freeloaders" is your internal linking structure. Your navigational hierarchy plays a key role in passing link gain deep into your site. Pages too far down the site tree won't get enough "juice" to warrant high rankings.

Just like with most things, the secret lies in working smarter, not harder, Spencer noted.