By Guest Author, Topher Kohan (@topheratl)

As the in-house SEO coordinator for CNN.com and the rest of Turner’s news properties (including CNN Money, CNN International and iReport), he has overseen a 17 percent increase in traffic from search year to year and oversaw one of the single largest search traffic days in the site’s history with the 2008 presidential election.

Editor’s Note: We asked Topher to write this for Tech Startups because his work is impressive. SEO’s of all types can benefit from his experience.

Now that the new CNN.com has been live for a while, I can sit back and say, yes, the SEO effort worked!

With that in my pocket, I wanted to walk you all through the path that I took to have as SEO-friendly a site as possible when it went live October 24.

Got involved with the process as soon as I could

They brought me in, and I inserted myself as much as I could during the wireframe stage. This was great, and I was able to ask a lot of questions about what items were on the page and what they would show the user.

After the wireframes, the next thing in front of me was the series of mockups that evolved into the final comps for the site. This was even better than the wireframes because I was given a real idea of the modules and items on the page, and then I could ask some tough questions about the technologies we would be using to build it out. I was able to have some really great conversations with them about the use of Flash and Ajax and the up / down side of using them in each case.

Finally, I was looking at the HTML reviews and was able to see the real world the code we were using and catch the little things that might be forgotten.

Do not forget about the little things

This was huge for me to be able to see the real-world code in HTML review and also final templates before launch.

This is the time I found all the little things that I might have overlooked or that were removed from the code in the final stages. I was not able to get it all in there at this point, but if it was just a mistake, this was the place to catch it.

Win the war, not the battle

Yes, things that I wrote about in the SEO requirements did not make it to the live version of the site. Yes, I wish they would have, but in the end, it is all about winning the overall war, so don’t fret. Keep your eye on the big picture.

The ends justify the means

In the end, the big picture is to get more traffic to your site from search, and that is my goal at CNN. I wanted to have the new site give the editorial team and me a good chance to optimize it to get as much search traffic as possible.

This is not the end of the road

Now that the site is live, I cannot give up. I need to keep on with the things that did not get in by launch day. Remember also that SEO is not a stand-still kind of world, so there is always something new to try to get done on the site.

Tags: cnn in-house seo , cnn ireport seo , cnn.com , enterprise seo , in-house seo , SEO , topher kohan , topher kohan seo , turner