As in an-house SEO specialist, you may well find yourself solely responsible for your company’s search engine marketing. It is not uncommon for an organization to limit their human investment in SEO to a single individual, particularly for new web ventures or where existing search marketing efforts are just being brought in-house.  The challenge facing a solo SEO is, of course, producing positive results without a great deal of specialist support.

Whether you are working as a member of the marketing team, attached to the IT department, or are singularly autonomous, both search strategy and tactical execution are likely to fall on your plate. For all but the smallest websites, this will rapidly result in an enormous work-load; in addition to the time required to stay on top of developments in your field. Effective management of your time, tasks and your organization’s expectations is critical if you are to have any success at all without committing all of your waking hours to SEO.

For those who manage or are already part of an honest-to-goodness team,  I urge you to keep reading. Introducing efficiencies that help improve the life a single in-house SEO can prove equally beneficial to individuals on an SEO team.

Delegate tasks where possible

Being successful in search marketing, and in particular organic SEO, involves co-opting the talents of individuals in diverse roles in order to perform work that will benefit SEO.  For example, once you have identified that the non-www form of your website needs to be redirected to the www form, someone in IT will have to make that change.

The solo in-house SEO, however, may have to extend this principle to include what would normally be considered specialist SEO tasks, simply to lighten the load. Best practices demand that every new page generated be assigned, at minimum, a unique title tag and meta description – is there a in-house copywriter that might be suited to this task? This will substantially free up your time if there are a large number of pages being produced daily (and a writer might actually be better at, um, writing, than you).

Any specialist tasks that you may wish to delegate will almost certainly involve training a surrogate so these tasks can be performed competently. While this in itself will require a time commitment on your part, this expenditure must be measured against the time this will potentially save you in the future. If you are spending an hour a day tagging pages, and it takes a day to train a copywriter to do this, you will start to see a positive return on your investment in under two weeks!

If you are a control freak this may, of course, require some attitude adjustment. But, if you are a control freak, you may encounter other problems working in an industry predicated on trying to manipulate something you do not have control over – search engine rankings.  Good luck with that.

Outsource where possible

As you start tackling your task list, you may find there are jobs that need to be done in support of SEO for which your organization either lacks the skills internally, or where in-house resources are inadequate to accomplish these tasks in a timely fashion. Depending on your budget and the magnitude of what needs to be undertaken, you may be able to outsource some of these components.

In support of PPC, for example, outsourcing landing page design (and even testing) may be a cost-effective mechanism for improving the ROI of paid search. Similarly, programming tasks such as custom script development or CMS modifications may be most expeditiously accomplished by contracting out the work.

While it might seem counter-intuitive to outsource some search marketing as part of an in-house SEO program, this indeed might be the case where this program is a fledgling one, or there is simply too much for one person to take on. All things being equal, paid search is the most obvious candidate for outsourcing, both because immediate ROI is easier to calculate and monitor compared to organic search, and because organic search success relies more heavily on leveraging the cooperation of disparate in-house stakeholders.  Needless to say, if you have been brought on board to manage paid search, then the opposite will be true.

Automate where possible

There are often several possible realms where efficiencies can be introduced by automating either recurring tasks or reporting. To the former, simple on-site SEO such as creating headings, titles, meta data or even image alt attributes might be automated by programmatically pushing database fields to the appropriate on-page locations. For reporting, look for opportunities where configuring analytics reports might obviate the need for manual data extraction, or where tools might be developed or purchased to track rankings, back links or other statistical SEO data.

As in the case of de facto task delegation, automating processes might require you to put in a bit of dedicated time up front, but save you a lot of effort in the long run.

Manage management

Here is a very common real-life scenario. A company has just taken the plunge and committed to an in-house SEO program, and management (largely uninformed about how SEO works) wants a projection on the financial impact of improved search engine rankings in the next quarter (or year, or whatever). There’s no been prior investment in SEO, so rankings are virtually non-existent, as are (in consequence) traffic or conversion numbers associated with organic search.

There are basically two responses. You can dedicate a week or two coming up with complex formulas based on different keyword ranking and conversion scenarios, and produce a very pretty spreadsheet populated with numbers that are basically bunk. Or you can be honest:  SEO efforts are just underway; there is no historical data that can be used to create meaningful predictive models, and any numbers I could come up would basically be bunk.

The benefit of the honest approach is, of course, that you are able to spend a couple of weeks productively employed on optimization tasks that will eventually impact your company’s bottom line, rather than delaying that success by wasting time in pointless speculation about those bottom-line improvements.

This is not to say that you should expect management to nod understandingly when you tell them that producing the report they desire is a waste of time:  you obviously need to explain why. But if you are afraid to be forthright, you may not only find yourself wasting time, but find yourself in a very unpleasant meeting in three months’ time, trying to explain why the metrics fall far short of your bogus projections.

Taking the reins of a search marketing program is, in general, not for the timid, and this is doubly true if you are solely accountable for the success or failure of SEO efforts. In order to attain search engine success, you need to be prepared to argue for resources, counteract initiatives which may harm organic search, demand better SEO support from recalcitrant colleagues or company units, and autonomously prioritize (or even veto) tasks based on your knowledge and expertise.

This is why the word “aggressive” should be thought of as laudatory, rather than pejorative, in the context of an in-house SEO professional – that is, not one who possesses an abrasive personality, but an individual who is willing to fight for what is needed for success, without slavishly deferring to superiors when they impede progress.

Find time for professional development

You may believe that time spent catching up on blogs, participating in forums, reading books or attending conferences are secondary in importance to “real” SEO work, and that these activities must always be sacrificed (or delegated to off-work hours)  in the face of an ever-increasing task list.

This is wrong-headed on two counts. First, if you fail to keep up on developments in the search marketing work, you will eventually miss out on opportunities to introduce efficiencies or re-prioritize your tasks based on new information. You may even find yourself laboring away on techniques that have since proven to be obsolete!

Second, you were hired to run in-house SEO at least in part because of your professional knowledge. In a field as dynamic as search engine marketing, that knowledge will rapidly prove obsolescent without dedicating time to stay on top of industry developments. You need to strike a balance with your other tasks, of course, but it is essential to carve out some time for professional development; and factually and forcefully respond to any colleague or superior who suggests such efforts are tantamount to slacking.

Always be tactical

When you are packing it in for the day, make a habit of asking yourself the question, “what did I do to improve SEO for my site today?”  The answer should never be “nothing.”

Strategic planning does not improve your rankings. A day of keyword research will not improve the ROI of your paid search unless you apply it to a campaign. Participating in the world’s greatest meeting does not result in a great inbound link to your site.

Yes, planning is vital to future search engine success, and you may have no choice but to put together a report for the CMO – but, as the only SEO in the house, if you are not making active contributions to improving your search rankings, nobody else is. Always try to find an hour or two in the day to actually do something impactful, even if it is as small as redirecting a URL that 404s, adding an alt attribute to that new button, or responding to that blogger who is poised to link to you.

Not all in-house jobs are created equal

Before you sign on the dotted line, make sure you know what is in store for you as an in-house SEO. This fictional job description is closely modeled on many real postings I have seen: SEO specialist required for growing website. Responsibilities include on-page search engine optimization, inbound link development, PPC management, making HTML changes to the main website, developing PHP scripts, writing content for two blogs, creating landing pages and developing marketing campaigns.

One of the satisfying aspects of working as an in-house SEO is that the job is usually anything but monotonous, but the diversity of daily tasks can obviously be taken too far.  At a certain point your chances of search success are going to decline in proportion to the breadth of your responsibilities. Taking on sole responsibility for an in-house SEO program is challenging enough:  make sure the job is at least focused on SEO.

By bringing search marketing in-house, a company has already made the determination that their SEO efforts are better managed internally than externally. Whatever the specific thought processes behind that decision, there are many realms where in-house SEO may offer an advantage over outsourcing of those same activities. In this sense, in-house SEO may be thought of as a competitive edge. And like any competitive advantage, it should be leveraged to maximize the benefits of that advantage.

This is not to say there may not be specific advantages to engaging independent contractors or using an agency, but that by thinking through and exploiting the inherent strengths of in-house SEO, you can improve the return on your in-house investment. Put another way, what can you do – or do better – that a company relying on external SEO support cannot?

SEO as an incentive

Regardless of the setting one of the biggest challenges for SEO, and in particular organic SEO, is getting all the players on board. Most SEO initiatives require both non-SEO talent and buy-in for tactical execution. Your strategy to create search-friendly URLs may be brilliant, but is not going to amount to much unless your developers also think it is a good idea, and put it on their production schedule. What’s in it for them?

Presumably, your company will benefit from increased search traffic or they would not have invested in SEO in the first place. Success in search means better profitability for the company. So by helping you, your colleagues will also be helping themselves. Bonuses may rely on company goals that search traffic can help meet. In the case of a start-up, employees have even more of a vested interest in the success or failure of efforts that are not directly under their control.

The benefits of SEO are not going to be much of an incentive for this sort of self-interested collegiality unless you very clearly demonstrate these benefits. With each success, loop back with those who helped make that success possible and provide statistical, bottom-line metrics that quantify that success.  “Thanks for your help with this project” is nice, but not quite as effective as, “thanks for your help with this project, which resulted in increased revenues of $50,000 from search engine traffic in September.”

Just a desk away

Hopefully, even without the promise of direct financial reward, your workplace fosters a spirit of camaraderie and teamwork. Building on that collegial spirit by developing close working relationships across the company is one of the most important advantages an in-house SEO program has over externally-managed search marketing, especially if that external relationship is literal, where contractors are not physically found in the office.

Again, SEO requires collective effort, and the more in which you involve your colleagues and provide feedback to them, the more motivated and effective collaborators they will become. Furthermore, by providing ongoing information, training and advice on SEO best practices, you can help bring the excitement, promise and payoff of search marketing efforts to the entire company. All things being equal, management will probably grant you more time to spend educating your colleagues than they would to a contractor or agency; if they’re enlightened, in-house SEO education is probably one of the reasons they hired you in the first place!

Search marketing aside, an in-house search program can, in itself, help build bridges that foster greater communication and teamwork in a company. There are few activities that cross over so many departmental boundaries, and one of those very specific advantages of in-house SEO is helping to globally connect the dots within an organization. More times than I can remember, a meeting or email has ended up with me introducing Jane to John’s initiative. Your media buyer may not even know where your developers sit; your server administrator may not even know you have an affiliate marketing team. You talk to them all (or you should), and one of the most important non-search services an in-house SEO can provide is putting the right stakeholders together.

Building your team, your way

If you are fortunate enough to have an SEO team, or if by reaping the fruits of your labor, you are able to start building one with the cash-flow you have generated, giving you the ability assemble a team that precisely addresses the needs of your company’s search marketing needs. You will be able to use hiring criteria that include specialist knowledge of what your company does or sells, filling gaps in your team’s abilities, or even personality. One way or another, you do not have to rely on the talent pool of a third-party provider.

Depending on the size of your company, you also may have a talent pool right at hand. By recruiting internally, you should have a much better idea of a potential SEO’s abilities and work habits than those of an external applicant.  Whatever your organization’s view on internal career moves, it will be much, much messier for a contractor or agency to bring an insider onto a company’s outsourced SEO team.

Furthermore, you may want to bring people onto your team that are not even experienced in SEO. An agency is never going to send you someone to train on the job (and a company is even more unlikely to allow that), but that may precisely be what your team needs. An individual with the right background, skills and mindset may have the potential to be an excellent SEO with your training and guidance. Good SEO help is, as they say, hard to find, and you may have better success cultivating SEOs than trying to find them.

I built a very talented team over the course of time by using these methods. In the end, the majority of my teammates came from elsewhere in the company, and the majority of them had very little or no experience in search marketing.  Yet, in a very short period of time, they were producing stellar results, and all (as far as I can determine) have remained in search marketing.

Testing the waters

Whether or not you have a team or you are the in-house team, you probably have more latitude to conduct tests than would be granted to an external contractor. Longer-term tests, particularly important for organic search optimization – can be undertaken without the risk that you will lose or no longer be able to afford the experimenter. You may also be able to test bolder hypotheses, as there will not be the same pressure to produce conclusions that are immediately actionable and profitable. Being granted the freedom to fail is one of the greatest ways to encourage innovation, and hopefully your organization understands and embraces this concept.

At the end of the day, who benefits from the knowledge derived from an elaborate and potentially expensive test?  When those tests are conducted in-house, your company and your company alone. For an agency, the lessons learned may be applied to aid any number of clients. I’m neither suggesting that agencies will share a client’s test results, nor use them to the present or future benefit of competitors, but simply that these are lessons learned in part on your dime.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the potential advantages offered by an in-house SEO program, but only examples. And there may be specific benefits for in-house SEO related to the particular niche your organization occupies. However big or small your company, and whatever industry it falls under, it will possess some advantages in search over similar companies without in-house SEO support. To make the most of those advantages, ensure you identify and exploit them.

The most important asset for an in-house SEO is the collective talent of the people that plan, produce and maintain a company’s website. The better informed these individuals are about search engine optimization strategies and tactics, the better your chance of search engine success. Company-wide SEO education is, in fact, one of the key benefits of an in-house SEO program that you can (and should) be leveraging for competitive advantage.

Logistical problems with execution notwithstanding, it is easy enough to delegate specific SEO-related tasks to the appropriate individuals in your organization. However, if you never get beyond the “what” of SEO to the “why” your colleagues (through no fault of their own), they will never become proactive partners in your optimization efforts. The better they understand, and can observe the benefits of their efforts, the better the chance that they will incorporate SEO considerations into their daily routines and website planning.

SEO 101: communicating the basics

SEO is all about using the <meta> keywords tag successfully, right? Augmented, of course, by some clever white-one-white footer text and a few links you’ve put in blog comments. Such misconceptions are extremely common among those previously unexposed to SEO; and you will even find a surprising number of front-line web workers that have never even heard of the acronym. Accordingly, your first educational efforts should be basic ones.

When you first take the reins of an in-house SEO program, put together a brief presentation on the fundamentals of SEO, using examples from your website and industry space. Keep it simple and non-technical, focusing chiefly on the importance of site architecture, content and links in search engine rankings. Work with management to ensure that anybody involved in the website is exposed to your talk.  If your company has an employee orientation program, make sure you have the opportunity to present to new employees.

The recipients of your wisdom may or may not retain the principles you outline in your introductory presentation, but conveying these principles is actually a secondary goal. Your primary objective at this stage is to impress upon your colleagues that SEO is a process in which they play a role. I always include a slide (even as a one-man show) entitled “meet your SEO team,” followed by a list of representative employees (or job titles), with an accompanying one-liner on how each activity impacts search marketing efforts.

Specialist SEO education

Different teams have different roles to play in your SEO efforts, and once you have given everyone in the company some baseline information, you need to follow up with information tailored to specific groups.  Again, actual seminars or training classes are an obviously efficient way of educating a number of people in the same or similar roles. The groups with whom you should engage may include, but are not limited to:

• IT. Things such as server environment, hosting and domain management all obviously impact SEO. Providing technologists with information on how the back end impacts ranking will not only avoid unpleasant errors, but get the IT team thinking of SEO-friendly solutions to development and migration tasks. Bring extra-caffeinated cola.

• Programmers and coders. Once you walk these folks through the ins and outs of canonicalization, you’ll find fewer 302s you need changed to 301s, and find fewer parameters appended to URLs – to name just two code-related issues of importance to SEO.  Bring donuts.

• Designers. Just providing the factual observation that SEO and design requirements are not mutually exclusive will get you off to a great start here. Letting your designers know how the search engines index and assign relevancy to pages will inevitably result in better designs for SEO.  Bring chocolate.

• Writers. Whether or not you walk them through twenty semantically-related ranking factors, or spend an entire hour talking about blog post titles, you’ll always benefit from broadening writers’ SEO knowledge. Training sessions aside, this is also one of the groups with whom you will also want to communicate most closely with on an ongoing basis, and even train in the use of your keyword tools. Bring bourbon.

• Marketing. More than you probably realize, your cousins in marketing are a potentially important source of backlinks. But they’ll never know the importance of relevant, direct links with helpful anchor text unless you tell them. Bring flowers.

Depending on the size of your shop, some of these roles might either be combined or further segmented, and you should adjust your strategy accordingly. In any case, your educational efforts do not end with the conclusion of your last class; equally, if not more important is sharing new knowledge on an ongoing basis with your colleagues.

In-house information sharing

As search engine features and ranking factors change continually, you must provide information on these changes to your collaborators as you encounter them. Dropping by somebody’s desk and chatting is encouraged, but there are more efficient ways of imparting lessons from the search world, particularly in larger organizations.

• Internal blog. An excellent way of sharing search marketing information is through an internal blog. It does not have the formatting limitations of email, or its shelf life. It also serves as a permanent repository for the links you are passing along, and if you have the bandwidth, you can also build out SEO reference resources like keyword lists.

• Email. While not as sexy as an internal SEO blog, email is still the most effective communication weapon in your arsenal. Even if you have a blog, you will want to broadcast the URLs of articles as you post them, as it is unlikely your whole audience will subscribe to the blog’s feed.

• Cross-departmental meetings. If your company hosts these, be there. While you may not be engaging with front-line web workers here, it is still a way of passing on knowledge to the correct teams.

Tying lessons to results

In order to truly gain allies in your search marketing efforts, it is important that you highlight positive results observed as a result of your colleagues’ work. On the one hand this is (of course) positive reinforcement, but it also helps teach them (and you) how theoretical SEO knowledge translates into real-life results.

Liberally and shamelessly employ a well-known email marketing technique in conveying results, namely the use of a “PS” in an email that contains a nugget of important information.  “PS – As a result of these improvements we’ve seen a 120% increase in search traffic to this page, and an additional $40K in revenue generated from them.”  Even the most jaded skimmer of email will take notice.

The payoff

SEO is still regarded as a mysterious and opaque practice by most people, even those in closely-related web disciplines. The better educated your coworkers, the less intimidated they will feel participating in SEO work, and, of course, the better their work will be from an SEO perspective.

While companies often outsource their SEO strategy and specialist tasks, they will rarely invest in dedicated, let along ongoing, SEO education for their employees. The training and insights you provide to you colleagues will not only result in better support for your search marketing efforts, but can give your company a competitive advantage in the search realm.

As an in-house SEO, where does the legitimate scope of your activities end, and those of somebody else begin? Are you being a useful and valid contributor, or simply poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong?  What is rightfully within your scope may surprise you.  Successful search engine marketing requires you to collaborate with individuals in diverse roles, and embracing these collaborative opportunities enables you to contribute in numerous ways to the success of your company’s web-based initiatives.

At a fundamental level, you need to engage with a wide variety of people to ensure that a website’s operations, architecture, navigation, design, content and promotion support your search marketing efforts.  At another level, those varied interactions, in conjunction with your search expertise, can help improve general website performance, sales and more. As the examples below show, search considerations can make an impact well beyond the requirements of SEO itself.

Site architecture

Search engines value well-structured websites with sensible and consistent navigation schemes. As websites, sections or individual web pages are planned, you will need to work with your information architecture and design teams to ensure what’s produced will support organic search rankings. Internal linking structure, folder and file naming conventions, and page-level architecture all impact your chances of SEO success.

These SEO requirements may, in turn, help improve the general user experience. A site with an inconsistent navigation structure will confuse a human visitor every bit as much – if not more – than it will confuse search crawlers. Just as a search engine robot will reach an indexing impasse when it  encounters an orphan page (a page without links to a parent page), a user is also more likely to leave a site when you have pulled up all the ladders. Make sure you have the opportunity to weigh in on these issues.

One perspective you will be able to bring consistently to design considerations is how a site works for lateral traffic. To a surprising degree, much site planning is predicated on top-down navigation, which assumes a user will enter a conversion pathway via the home (or another) page and obediently follow the required click-path. In search, one hopes to return the most relevant page for a query in the search engines results, increasing the chances of a click-through and preventing attrition by requiring multiple clicks. Does this page stand on its own, or does it require an upper-level page for context? Are the calls-to-action sensible if this page is accessed directly? Simply posing these questions can help improve usability.

Marketing campaigns

Even in the absence of paid search traffic, there will always be intersections between SEO and specific marketing campaigns. When a marketing campaign will be rolling out that includes television, radio or print advertising components, you need to be a part of the planning to ensure that there is a target landing page that is optimized and indexed for search terms related to that campaign’s name or primary concepts.

As with most search-related issues, early involvement in marketing campaigns is key, even at the conceptual level. If, for example, your company is promoting a contest in TV or in print, throngs of users will ignore the call-to-action URL and search for the contest by name, brand, key concepts, or a combination of the above.  A campaign concept that works well for search should be short, memorable and unique – which are obviously general attributes of successful promotions as well.

At the very earliest stage in campaign planning, keyword research can help provide ideas about words that might resonate with your target audience for a particular promotion. Whether from existing search traffic to your website or from keyword research related to your company’s field, search provides a unfiltered window on how users perceive your brand and the commercial space it occupies. Do not hesitate to share these insights to improve more “traditional” marketing activities.

Landing pages

Landing pages are usually tied to marketing campaigns and, like the campaigns they are associated with, you need to be aware of their existence and their performance, even if they were not designed with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in mind. Indeed, one of the first questions to ask is if any given landing page could serve as a search advertising target, even if that was not its intended purpose.

For exclusive web-based campaigns – say a promotion limited to visits from a partner site – you need to control the how target pages are indexed or excluded from indexing. It will be a little less exclusive of a campaign if the target landing page begins appearing in the organic search results for relevant keywords.

For campaigns that include indexed pages, what is its lifespan? When will the promotion expire? When it does, what will be done with those landing pages? In another example of top-down navigation bias, it is remarkable how many people believe that removing a link to a page ends its existence:  a defunct landing page should be redirected in order to preserve the value of links to that page. If you are unaware of its existence, or blindly rely on others to handle a promotion life cycle correctly, the page could simply end up deleted, and your link equity will evaporate.

Stay on top of landing page performance too, even in the absence of a paid search component. Knowing what works and what doesn’t for landing pages will be invaluable in designing your own (just as banner campaign metrics may aid in paid keyword selection). You may even discover (and this happens more frequently than it should) that those running these campaigns may not be collecting the proper metrics, are not availing themselves of opportunities for testing, or have overlooked some other critical aspect of campaign delivery or measurement. On these occasions you can help improve the general effectiveness of marketing efforts in your organization by weighing in with your experience and expertise.

Merchandising

What can search marketing contribute to merchandising? Isn’t it the job of a search marketer to ensure that users can find your company’s goods and services once they’ve already been selected and put in a (virtual) store window? This last example might seem well beyond the realm of SEO, but again the usefulness of keyword research can extend past pure search-related activities.

Keyword research can provide valuable information on trends relevant to your company. What sort of product-related queries are on the rise? What sort of searches are you seeing fall off, even though your rankings for those queries remains high? Keyword data can help merchandisers get a jump on emerging consumer interests, as well as signaling where interest is faltering. Something as simple as Google Insights for Search and your own search logs can help augment financial metrics and market research for those making merchandising decisions.

Are you even calling your products the right thing? Of course you will have a much easier time optimizing pages for keywords that actually appear there, but at a broader level – you’ll also have better sales success if your products are semantically framed in a way that users understand and expect. A potential customer might hit the back button when confronted with a tub of crushed groundnut, but actually pull out the credit card for a jar of peanut butter.

Merchandising, along with the other areas discussed above, are just examples of the type of web activities in which an in-house SEO should get involved. However regimented or compartmentalized a company’s structure, your SEO efforts will bear the most fruit if you take an expansive view of where you should get involved. And more often than not your involvement will reap benefits that extend past the limited goals of search engine optimization.

I recently encountered this tweet from Aidan Beanland, a Regional SEO Manager at Yahoo!:

When the SEO manager is the last to know about a new site section that’s already live –> big fat FAIL.

This is, unfortunately, such a common occurrence for SEO managers that it should have a name:  the Big Surprise (conveniently abbreviated as “BS”).  The new site section nobody thought to tell you about.  URLs nobody thought to redirect when file naming conventions were changed.  The “top secret” regional domain that materialized out of nowhere, providing Google with a neat duplicate of your site.

While it is unlikely that you will never encounter a Big Surprise when surfing your site, there are a number of steps you can take to reduce such incidents from occurring.  And when you are blindsided by a significant change to a website that undermines your SEO efforts, your response can both help avoid repeat performances and win allies for your cause.

BS risk reduction

The first step in avoiding unpleasant SEO surprises is early engagement with key stakeholders in your organization.  This engagement needs to be highly structured for, until you provide specifics, decision makers are unlikely to know which of their activities impact SEO and which do not.  Especially as in-house SEO efforts are getting underway, your colleagues are unlikely to know much about how SEO works, and part of your job is to instruct them.

So when you first approach managers, team leads or other decision-makers in each area that affects SEO, let them know exactly what issues they need to consult you about.  Keep this list succinct, especially to begin with:  it is better to have someone fully aware of five things critical for SEO than twenty-five things they will never remember.

The list of SEO-related issues you raise with each person will vary by department or area of responsibility; tailor your alert list accordingly, as per the examples below.

IT and server management:

• Changes to existing URLs, including removal or addition of parameters
• Any change in the domain environment, including domain acquisitions

Information architecture, usability and design:

• Changes to global navigation or bread crumbs
• Changes to display technology (e.g., modifications that employ Flash, Ajax or JavaScript)
• Addition, deletion or redirection of pages

Marketing and merchandising:

• Marketing or social media efforts that result in new spiderable content (especially when these are created on other networks that may not be on your radar)
• Changes to affiliate program tracking or content delivery
• Substantive changes to product lines being offered on an e-commerce site

Both for future reference and to drive the point home, follow up your meet-and-greet with a friendly but focused email, with bullet points just like the ones above.  This also gives you the opportunity to copy others in the same group (the more eyes that are open on your behalf, the merrier).  Rinse and repeat when new people – particularly managers and directors – join the company.

Corporate secrecy and the BS it can cause

I once approached a huddle composed of the Art Director and a bunch of designers.  “Nothing for you to see here, Bradley, this has no relation to SEO!”  Suitably chastened, I walked away.  Sure enough, a few days later came the Big Surprise:  an April Fools’ micro-site backing an outrageous “rumor” intended to go viral and cause a surge in traffic.  Yep, a big heap of inbound links – no relation to SEO, of course.

In the course of your discussions, let senior strategists know that your discretion can be assured.  You understand that, for a variety of reasons, foreknowledge of certain web-related initiatives needs to be restricted to key stakeholders – and that you are one of them.

Responding to the BS: one (but only one) free pass

It is Tuesday morning when, deep in the throes of keyword analysis, you receive a company-wide email from the CEO congratulating everyone on the new blog that has just been launched.  The one you have never seen before.  The Big Surprise.

Obviously, the first steps you need to take are remedial:  doing what you can to repair any damage that has occurred, or quickly capitalizing on any SEO benefits from a potentially lost opportunity.  Once any fires have been extinguished, turn your efforts towards preventing a repeat performance.

Do not panic, and do not let your ire get the best of you.  Keep in mind that the Big Surprise is almost never malevolent, and respond accordingly.  Unless your organization is populated by psychopaths intent on undermining your optimization efforts, any damage they have done to SEO is born of ignorance, not intent.

Put together a reasoned response, and amass any analytics data that demonstrates the impact of the Big Surprise on the company’s performance in search and, if at all possible, on the bottom line.  When you debrief those responsible on the consequences of their actions, keep the focus on lessons learned from the incident.  Provide one or more updates with more metrics.  By making your point civilly and backing it up with relevant numbers, your underlying message will not require spelling out:  don’t let it happen again.

If it does happen again, and you’ve taken both the proactive and reactive steps I’ve outlined, then you can reasonably expect to hold those responsible accountable.  Demanding that accountability is important, unless you want to see your SEO continually derailed by carelessness.  Typically, SEO efforts must be given visibility by its practitioners.  If an e-commerce website goes down for a day heads roll; if a site loses 1,000 inbound links because of URL rewrites, it may only illicit a shrug without a demonstration of why those lost links matter.

The good news: the BS diminishes over time

By continually educating key people in your organization about SEO, and by responding appropriately to SEO mishaps, you should see fewer and fewer Big Surprises in your future.  In the best of all possible worlds, you’ll be included in strategic decision-making processes, further diminishing the chance of tactical mistakes being made.  There will always be SEO-related issues on a website that have been overlooked, but they need not be a “big, fat FAIL.”

It hardly needs saying that content is important for SEO: a properly structured site with frequently updated, keyword-rich content is the best foundation for high search engine rankings. Quality content that is interesting or useful to users also has an excellent chance of receiving unsolicited links, further enhancing a website’s ability to rank well for relevant searches. To maximize these considerable benefits, SEOs should take an aggressive, hands-on approach to content creation and promotion.  Being involved at every stage of a website’s content development cycle offers the best chance of supporting in-house optimization efforts.

“Content” is, of course, a pretty broad label. While an SEO tends to think of content as text, a website’s content is the sum of everything that appears on its pages, from words to videos to buttons.  Ultimately, non-textual elements such as images or audio files still form part of a website’s semantic universe and, if anything, should be singled out as content optimization targets. That an image lacks an alt attribute, or a webcast a summary or transcript, is nothing if not a lost optimization opportunity.

Regardless of the component parts, in-house SEOs are (unsurprisingly) best prepared to exploit the search engine value of website content. In terms of topicality, nobody knows a site’s keyword universe better, nor has a better understanding of what content users are searching for relevant to that universe. From a logistical standpoint, pushing content live may require work by copywriters, developers, designers – stakeholders an in-house SEO knows and works with on a daily basis. And strategically, it may well be SEO that is the driving force behind content development in the first place, simply because it is required to maintain or improve search engine rankings.

Chicken or egg?  Content optimization vs. content development

Who owns content (particularly textual content) in your organization? Marketing? Merchandising?  Public relations? A chief editor? As often as not, the answer to this question is poorly defined, split between numerous stakeholders, or simply unknown. Ill-defined content ownership often means an ill-defined content strategy, and this is both a problem to be solved and an opportunity for SEO.

I would argue strongly that SEO should take an active rather than passive role in content development. Whether or not this means “owning” content in the sense of being responsible for it, or simply being an important contributor to the content landscape, SEO needs to be involved strategically and tactically at many points in the content development lifestyle. Optimal content, in the holistic sense, will always perform better in search than content that is simply “optimized” after it has already been produced.

Whether taking a defining or contributing role in content development, there are points prior, during and after the production of content where in-house SEO should lend support and guidance.

Content topics and treatments

Content development starts with strategic planning, and it is imperative that SEO takes an active role in the planning process. This is particularly true when there is an initiative to expand a website’s content base by adding new content sections, or substantially revising existing content. There are a number of ways by which SEO can add value to discussions surrounding topicality:

• Provide topic suggestions based on keyword trending data, such as Google Insight for Search
• Use internal search and traffic metrics to reveal which topics are important to users
• Once a topic has been determined, provide actionable keyword analysis to writers

Based on your analysis and observations, provide page, post and section titles early. An SEO-friendly title, using important keywords, is not only beneficial for SEO in its own right, but helps frame the semantic nature of the content that’s produced. Without your input, the desired “Review of the New iPod Touch” may take life as “The Scoop on Apple’s Latest Music Machine.”

Content container architecture

Where will the new content live, and how will it be presented on the website? While SEO-friendly site architecture is a whole topic unto itself, often content development involves new page design, and at the very least, always requires integration into the existing site structure. Whether new page templates are being developed, or if this is simply an opportunity to improve the existing structure, there are a number of steps an SEO can take to help ensure SEO-friendly content containers.

• Ensure file names will be SEO-friendly, especially for static content where file names may be hard coded
• Ensure pages possess a sensible heading and sub-heading structure
• Define in advance how content will be integrated into the site’s linking structure
• Ensure that components like Flash and JavaScript are only used if truly required

Coming late into the architecture phase can have very unfortunate consequences. I’ve found myself looking at videos without dedicated landing pages, page titles rendered as background images – even a blog created entirely in Flash where it was impossible to link to individual posts!

Publishing and indexing

Make sure your shiny new content is ready for the search engines, and expedite the indexing process in any way you can (particularly critical, of course, for topical news). Steps you can take to improve SEO traction and encourage rapid indexing include:

• Ensure the <title>, <meta> description, <meta> keywords and <img> alt attributes are encoded by an SEO prior to the content going live
• Ensure that XML sitemaps are updated
• Ensure that pings are sent for any syndicated content
• Notify the world about the newly-published content by linking to it, which can include highlighting it on a blog or news section, posting the URL on Twitter or pointing to the new content on a Facebook page

Process is important here, and ignoring it may dull the impact of excellent content. A page that is SEO-friendly when it goes live will perform much better in search than one where SEO tasks were deferred in the interest of expediency, especially for topical content. Ensure the process allows time for dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, ideally by making final SEO tasks part of the work flow.

Providing feedback

The writers have really taken heed of your keyword analysis, and produced some fabulously rich content. The developers have gone the extra mile and produced an RSS feed from scratch, and now a site section of topical content is syndicated. Don’t simply pat them on the back and move onto the next task; provide them with feedback on what their efforts actually achieved in search. Provide writers and other content developers with:

• Reports showing organic keyword traffic to the new content
• Reports correlating conversions – purchases, sign ups, newsletter opt-ins, etc. – with keyword traffic
• Newly-achieved rankings in one or more engines (screen shots are great)

By providing this sort of data to your content partners, you’ll not only be acknowledging the importance of their work, but increasingly make them partners in search engine optimization efforts.  I’ve known more than one writer that’s been initially indifferent to search marketing that’s ended up sending me search result screen shots. Sharing knowledge and success metrics with your extended team (i.e., virtually everyone) both empowers them and demystifies the SEO work they undertake.

In summary, in-house SEOs will see the ranking returns on an organization’s investment in content by making their presence felt in each stage of the process. If, as the adage goes, “content is king” for SEO, a successful in-house SEO should endeavour to become the king (or queen) of content.