Search Marketing Expo is pulling out all the stops when it comes to meeting the needs of in-house search marketers in Santa Clara March 2-5. Attend and you’ll leave with more than enough ideas, strategies and contacts to keep you ahead of the curve and connected with colleagues until next year.

The agenda is full of valuable SEM nuggets, so it’s difficult to say there is one “dream” agenda. It depends on the challenges you’re facing this year. I’ll preview the sessions I think most in-housers should attend and why. Check out the compete agenda here.

Monday, March 1st

SMX kicks off with the “SMX Meet & Greet” on Monday March 1st at 6pm. This is typically small and full of speakers. If there is a speaker you want to meet, this is the best place to do that. The night before the show, everyone’s on a “conference high” and ready to talk.

Tip #1: At the end of each day’s scheduled activities, the Hyatt bar will be full of search marketers. Come hang out. You’ll meet amazing people and get the best information!

Tuesday, March 2nd

Tuesday’s sessions kick off with Steve Ballmer’s keynote. No one should miss the opportunity to here Steve talk about what’s next for Bing.

The conference sessions ramp up at 10:45. For the search marketing newbies, you’ll find the Keyword Research & Tools session helpful. Those looking at what’s next and how to get to the next level will want to catch the Real Time Search & Major Search Engines session. If you have mobile search interests, there is a Mobile PPC session also competing with this slot.

After lunch there is the copywriting session that you’ll find especially interesting if you write SEO copy or train writers who do. You’ll get many ideas from this session’s speakers, Heather Lloyd-Marting and Jill Whalen, two of the first search marketers to focus on copywriting. Also competing with this slot is a mobile search session; if that is up your alley, one of the speakers is Michael Martin, a fellow in-houser at Resource Nation who will be speaking at the In-house Exchange. For the PPC in-housers, there is a session about new Google formats that’s not to be missed.

Tuesday afternoon gets really juicy! At 3pm, choose from Google’s Personalized Search Revolution or Ranking Tactics for Local Search. Personalized search is changing things dramatically and this session will be packed. If you deal with brick-and-mortar locations Rankings Tactics for Local Search is for you.

Tuesday at 4:30 there will be a myriad of different topics. The session I find most interesting is Supercharge Your Descriptions with Sitelinks; anything you can do to get more eyeballs on a listing has a chance to increase the value SEO adds to the bottom line. In-housers active in social media marketing should attend The Current State of Social Search session, where you’ll get great statistics for supporting your social media business case.

At 5:45 the Expo Hall Reception has drinks and appetizers courtesy of Ask.com. Then it’s time for dinner!

Tip #2: After happy hour, a bunch of in-house folks are connecting for dinner. It’s not on the official agenda, so it’s usually fairly small and intimate like the In-house Exchange. For details contact Emily [at] seoinhouse dot com.

Right after dinner everyone is heading to “SMX After Dark”, the biggest party of the show. It’s sponsored by Bing, who always throws memorable parties.

Wednesday, March 3rd

The morning kicks off with the crowning of the SMX Biggest Search Geek. More than 1000 people participated in the contest this year, so winning is a big deal! Last year’s winner was in-house SEO Keri Morgret, who’s speaking at SMX West this year and local to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bring your IT department if you can swing it, even if it is only one lead programmer or technical product manager. The “Technical SEO Track” happens on Wednesday and hearing SEO needs from the experts at this conference can be invaluable.

Don’t miss Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues. Vanessa Fox usually points you to a checklist for diagnosing technical problems (ask her about it if she doesn’t talk about it). For the PPCers, the Paid Search Bullseye! session looks like a good way to reach and close your ultimate customer, i.e. how to get more qualified people to your site so you can reduce your spend.

After lunch, the 90-Day SEM Fitness Plan is a good choice for companies new to search marketing, especially if you don’t have a solid 2010 plan together already. For those dealing with technical issues related to URLs, the session Dealing With Domains, Parameters & All That Jazz is right up your alley. For the PPC’ers, you’ll love Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search.

At 3:15, enterprise level SEOs will benefit from Industrial Strength SEO. Fellow in-housers Dave Lloyd (Cisco) and Marshall Simmonds (New York Times) are on that panel. They always give great presentations.

The last slot of the day has two highly recommended sessions – 60 Minutes Per Day for Social Media Success and The Need For Speed: Google Says It Matters. Now that page load times will officially impact rankings, this is the stuff you need to forward to your IT department. If you are lucky enough to have your IT person attend on Wednesday, send them to this session. The social media session is very useful because it will show you how to do social media effectively in very little time – a big challenge for most in-housers.

Thursday, March 4th

This day kicks off with The State of The Search Union, an interesting commentary on what’s going on in the industry. Grab your morning beverage of choice and take a peek at the future.

For In-housers, the first 2 sessions are just for you!

At 10am, we have a great lineup that will talk about various aspects of doing in-house SEO, from salaries and job titles to getting things up and running for in-house SEO.

At 11am we have a similar session for PPC. Get salary data, job descriptions and information for starting your PPC program in-house.

Other morning sessions to consider are the Ask the Engines at 11:30, Mystery Search Science Theater, and the SEO and PPC clinics.

After lunch, I recommend Analytics Action Plans for PPC & SEO. Demonstrating results is vital these days. And with budgets getting cut, you need to know how to slice-and-dice your numbers to illustrate the results you’ve achieved.

The last session of the show has goodies too, including Ask the Link Builders and The Conversion Ninja Toolbox. If you’re dealing with reputation management issues, you should check out the Social Media, Search & Reputation Management. If Twitter is your thing, the Twitter Clinic is a practical choice because they’ll look at real examples and provide real-world critiques.

Friday, March 5th

Friday is workshop day. And the In-house SEM Exchange specific for in-house search marketers.

In-house SEM Exchange is an intimate environment of facilitated discussion. No pre-defined presentations, no vendors, no sales pitches. It’s the day where you can ask anything and detailed answers from people who have been there before, because they are doing search in-house!

Learn more about the In-house SEM Exchange.

Tip #3: Be sure to check out my handful of helpful tips for SMX West 2010.

I look forward to meeting you all there! If you haven’t already, here’s the link. Register now!

The agenda is packed with sessions on any topic you need to know about, including two days specifically tailored to in-house challenges (October 7th & 8th).

Follow my “dream agenda” below and you will leave SMX with the things you need to get your in-house search marketing program moving in the right direction. Take a sneak peek at it here, or keep reading for my commentary!

Sunday, Arrival Day

My biggest advice for any conference is to not scrimp on social activities, especially when it comes to search engine marketing because it’s a field that really grew from people telling each other what works and what doesn’t. Remember that the best advice often comes in the informal discussions you have at networking events. Therefore, plan to arrive early enough to attend the Meet & Greet Reception. At this casual event, you’ll find a high ratio of speakers to non-speakers, which can mean extra great networking if you work the room! If you don’t know anyone, hunt me down. I’ll be there and will make sure you meet great people.

Monday October 5th – Day 1

My plan is to start off SMX East with the Analytics track. Especially in this economic climate, you need to know how to dig deep into your analytics and there are two sessions devoted to getting you up to speed.

For the first session, I recommend Web Analytics You Should Know. However, if you know the basics of Web Analytics and have questions on PageRank Sculpting after Google’s June announcement, then you may want to attend Revisiting PageRank Sculpting & Siloing. I suspect the PageRank session will be heavily blogged about, so if you can’t decide, attend the Analytics session and read the write-ups about the PageRank session.

For the second session, attend Actionable PPC Insights from Analytics Data. If you don’t do PPC, you may want to check out the Duplicate Content Issues: The Search Engine Edition (but note that it’s the engines speaking, so the content will be good, but filtered) or Keyword Research and Tools. When it comes to keyword research there are so many nuances that I always pick up a few good tips and tools when attending any keyword research session. Even though I have been doing SEO since 2002, I still attend a keyword research session at least once a year.

After lunch, every SEO should be in the Actionable SEO Insights from Analytics Data. The un-mined data in your analytics tool is a field of the most beautiful gems your SEO campaign could ever have! Richard Zwicky from Enquisite is one of the speakers and he’ll have some jaw-dropping, got-to-have data. I’m so passionate about this session that I’ll be in the front row feverishly taking notes.

Evening festivities abound on Monday, so make time for them! There is the Expo Hall Reception and the Internet Marketer’s Charity Party@SMX. Everyone goes to the charity party and your entire $50 donation goes to charity. It is always great fun and lends itself to meeting new people.

Also, the attendees of the In-house SEM Exchange (more on that later) will be gathering for dinner before the Internet Marketer’s Charity Party@SMX.

Tuesday October 6th – Day 2

For the first session, hit the Ecommerce Search Marketing Tactics session. The e-commerce sessions often have a few pieces of advice that can be used on any type of site. If your company is interested in social media, you may want to check out Real Time Search: Opportunity or Hype.

After lunch there are three interesting sessions. If you have SEO technical questions for the engines, attend Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices Edition. But what is getting me excited is the Pumping Up YouTube session if you do (or want to do) video SEO, and Iran & Michael Jackson: What Marketers Can Learn From How Consumers Search for Current Events. The current events session is especially good for any news portal because you will gain insights into what companies are doing, and how you can develop a strategy to be front-and-center for breaking news. Plus, Gord Hotchkiss is the moderator and I have never been disappointed when he is on stage.

For the last session I recommend Case Study: Integrating & Measuring Search As Part of the Marketing Mix. As an in-house search marketer, you need tangible case studies on how other companies are doing search marketing successfully and this session will give good examples that you can incorporate into any presentation to management on the value of search marketing.

Wednesday October 7th – Day 3: In-house Track

For in-house search marketers, this is an ideal day because it includes the In-house Track. All day, you’ll find sessions tailored to the unique needs of the in-house search marketer. By this time you will have gathered countless action items, and in the In-house Track you’ll learn how to take them back to the team, get buy-in and implement your changes smoothly.

Start off the morning with Bringing SEO In-house: How to be Successful. This session is good for anyone who is starting SEO at their company and anyone at a company whose SEO program isn’t yet running like a well-oiled machine. You’ll learn the components of a successful in-house SEO program and team. The biggest competition for this session is Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues, which is a great session from Vanessa Fox, but it will probably get more write-ups than the in-house session. Be sure to download Vanessa’s presentation even if you don’t attend the session.

For the second session, attend bringing PPC In-house: How to Be Successful. Like the SEO session, you’ll learn the components of a successful in-house PPC program.

During lunch, look for the In-house Birds of a Feather Tables(s). You’ll be able to sign up for these ahead of time on SMX Connect, the show’s social networking tool. SMX Connect will launch in mid-September.

After lunch, any medium-to-large organization should attend Managing Search Across Business Units. This is perfect if you manage multiple websites, different business units and different stakeholders. This session will show you how to manage and scale a search marketing program.

For the last session of the show, I recommend How to Solve Your Top In-house Challenges & Obstacles. We’ve allowed plenty of Q&A time to answer your in-house questions that have not yet been answered.

Sessions end at 3PM and attendees of the In-house SEM Exchange will get together for drinks after the show and talk about their big SMX East takeaways!

Thursday October 8th – In-house SEM Exchange

The In-house SEM Exchange is an add-on day for in-house search marketers only, focusing on SEO all day. There are no presentations, it’s all discussion and you have time to really dig into your specific questions and discuss how things are being done at different companies.

It’s been described as the event for advanced search marketers, who will get the most from the event because you can really get into the strategy behind the tactics. Attendees are the last event included big brands such as Microsoft, Tribune Company and eBay.

To make the most of your conference week, check out our Conference Tips for the In-house SEO.

So that’s it! My Dream Agenda for In-house Marketers. You can take a look at it “at-a-glance” here. Then register for SMX East! You’ll save $200 off the on site rate by registering now!

Yesterday I spoke with an in-house SEO at a billion dollar company, responsible for 30 sites. She clearly recognized there is no way she can do it all, and SEO needed to be pushed down to the different divisions. Her question was, “how do I do it if they don’t seem interested and clearly don’t have the time?”

After we talked about how to push SEO down to the divisions, with her overseeing it all, I could sense some clear hesitation on the rate of success. It turns out that there are 3 specific product managers that she feared wouldn’t do what they needed to be done – keyword research. As she went into the reasons why, I put it into perspective with one sentence:

“Not everyone has the aptitude for SEO.”

She was taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to her that some people might not be a good fit to take on SEO duties, despite them having the role that clearly needs to be taking on SEO tasks in any organization, especially one of this size. One could argue that they may not be in the right job, but if they’re doing stellar in all areas, you may not want to sack someone for not being able to master SEO. Instead, focus on securing buy-in and holding them accountable for getting the work done under your terms (aka, predefined solutions).

How can someone without the aptitude get the in-house SEO tasks done? You, as the in-house SEO must outline how and what they need to do.  Here are a few options I have recommended to various companies:

• You document the process to the Nth degree so that anyone can do it, and tell them how long it would take (I’ve done it, it can be done).

• Establish that someone in the company will execute the task(s) when needed. This person could be someone in another division who can do the task(s) well, or someone in a centralized SEO team that does this type of busy work for the entire company.

• Establish an agency relationship for this exact situation, so that whenever the need arises, those without the aptitude drop an email or pick of the phone to reach the agency that, you, as the in-house SEO, have already vetted and approved for their use. Tip: It’s extra easy if you already set the agency up as a vendor and each division has virtually zero administrative work and pre-defined pricing to kick off these mini-engagements.

What are companies doing to bring SEO in-house successfully?

Many are doing 80%-90% in-house, and use an agency for the remaining 10%-20%. We’re seeing a lot of companies hire a decent SEO with 2-4 years of experience, and using SEO Consulting to handle the more senior level SEO challenges.  To put into perspective the consulting volume you’ll need, many of our clients fall in this category and use about 15-25 hours per month of consulting, typically landing at the 13-20 hour range. Everything else is managed in-house.

5 things you can do to bring SEO in-house smoothly:

Train every single person that influences the website. When you train everyone on SEO you’ll have more minds focusing on SEO. The reality is that no one person is going to make SEO reach its maximum potential, it’s going to be the result of what everyone on the team is doing to implement SEO. This training can be done via online tutorials, by your in-house SEO (depending on their depth/breadth of experience), or by bringing in a consultant to do the training on-site or virtually. One tip, though you are training them on SEO, be sure to reinforce that they the team shouldn’t fly solo on SEO because there is an overarching strategy  and approach to tactics that you’ll want to oversee for success.

Get an SEO audit. What better way to kick of an in-house effort than to get a detailed report that outlines what needs to be changed, what is working well, and where your opportunities lie, along with a complete SEO strategy and clearly defined priorities? You can get it through an SEO audit and most SEO agencies offer some form of an SEO audit, it’s typically the first thing we do with a client. The SEO Audit becomes your roadmap for actions moving forward and something you’ll want to share with everyone on the team to identify how to best prioritize things and get them into the release schedule. If you can’t afford to have a consultant do the audit, make sure that your in-house SEO is tasked with this on day one while everything is fresh, they are objective and free to recommend things outside the box. Bring copy optimization in-house. Optimizing page copy, writing page title tags, meta descriptions and ALT can easily be accomplished by your in-house copywriters with a bit of training and mentoring. Will they like at first? Not likely. But it will get traffic, they will get used to it, and they will master it to the point that keywords flow naturally and the content won’t sound optimized. The challenge with doing this is managing it. One solution is to create a tool that scores each page of the site, so that copywriters (and their managers) can receive feedback on their optimization performance.

First attempt at SEO Requirements. Of the common challenges of hiring someone with only 2-4 years of experience is that they may not have had enough diverse experiences to catch the more senior SEO issues and opportunities.  One of the things we do with clients to help increase their knowledge base and reduce the consulting bills is to have the in-house SEO take the first swipe at adding SEO requirements to page designs and project documentation, then we come in and add what’s missing. This allows you to get the complete set of requirements and additional opportunities or options presented to IT, while increases your knowledge along the way by identifying what was missed.

Engage an agency to help you through it. Most in-house SEOs haven’t built an in-house SEO program yet, which means they’re learning trial by fire at times. One of the best things you can do to ensure your in-house SEO program goes off without a hitch and goes further faster is to work with an agency to help you build an in-house SEO program. I was at the Search Insider Summit in December where Intuit talked about bringing their PPC program in-house – one of their keys to success was to engage an agency to help them implement their in-house PPC program. Working with an agency will help you create an in-house SEO plan of action, a roadmap that outlines what you need to do, and when.

In-house SEO can be extremely rewarding, despite its many challenges. To be successful at in-house SEO, you need to effectively address challenges with in-house SEO, the first time, or it can put you at disadvantage both organizationally and in the search results because of missed opportunities. Following these tips will get you on the right track to building an in-house SEO program that gets you further, faster.

“I feel like a detective” said my client two days into intake discussions with IT. We’re doing a customized SEO training program that involves understanding how the development process works so that the information can be tailored to identify key deliverables and where SEO needs to be inserted in the development life cycle. Everywhere we turn, new deliverables, opposition and/or steps in the life cycle arise.

Much of what happens between idea to launch is a mystery to in-house SEOs who typically sit in the marketing department. Instead, what you need to do is constantly wear the detective hat, or at the very least, keep it in your back pocket at all times.

Whenever you interact with someone from IT and they talk about what they are working on, listen for buzz words – documentation names, project deliverables, etc. so that you can poke around to find out if it’s something that you need to be a part of.

If you have the chance, and especially when you start SEO and get a renewed interest in SEO, meet with each team involved in the website to understand:

1. Their role in a project, their key areas of interest
2. What meetings they attend
3. What deliverables they create or contribute to

Armed with this knowledge, you can begin to understand where SEO requirements will need to be incorporated.

Just because you have these “intake” discussions or interviews, bear in mind that you may actually get a complete picture. Experience has shown that it’s a never ending quest to understand what’s happening with IT – it’s like an onion, everywhere you look there is a new layer to peel, and on top of that their processes evolve and change over time, adding to the challenge.

One would think that you could tap a single person to get this information, but I find this to be the case only for small organizations. When it comes bigger brands with large IT departments that ooze red tape and corporate politics, it’s surprising that no one person seems to know the entire life cycle beginning to end – with all of its intricacies that occur within each role. Because SEO can go south with one wrong turn in each department, it’s in your best interest to take the time to figure it all out.

Detective work in practice: When in-house, I was everywhere in the company and talking to as many people as possible to figure out intricacies of a website release. I was continuously surprised at how many actions and deliverables people were not aware that were happening on any given project. At one company, it took over a year to get the full picture, and once I had it, it was extremely powerful – both in attaining respect, but also in getting looped into the right meetings, discussions and deliverables.

When you’re an in-house SEO, it’s vital that you understand how a project goes from idea to launch, which means you need to keep your detective hat at an arms reach at all times because it is often the little that will make you or cost you thousands, or even millions, of dollars.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for SEO site audits, SEO training and helping in-house SEO programs become a well-oiled machine that cranks out profits. The In House column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

One the best things you can do for successful SEO is equip the development team with SEO knowledge, and this requires more than a 30 minute presentation. Unfortunately, IT often pushes back saying there isn’t time. Here are six tactics for getting IT into your training sessions when they say, “We don’t have time for SEO training.”

Proper SEO training takes time, but for IT departments it costs more than X man hours. Almost every hour of a developer’s day is allocated to project work, and a half-day or full-day of SEO training will put project timelines at risk, causing IT to put up the stop sign for your SEO training initiative.

When this happens, the best approach to take is to not fight it, and instead figure out a way to get IT managers to want to their team to attend SEO training. Here are a few of creative strategies I recommend when clients are ready to move forward with SEO training, but IT brings the effort to a grinding halt.

• Pitch for SEO Training to happen far in advance. This first step is necessary so that IT can schedule the training to occur in between projects. Sometimes I work with clients who pitch one to two days of SEO training, get the business sponsors and marketing managers on board and expect IT to be able to fit it in their schedules within 2-4 weeks. Nope, not likely to happen. Anticipate this and pitch for it to happen well before you need it for that large redesign.
• Do training via lunch-and-learn sessions. Developers are curious about SEO and we have never given a lunch-and-learn or one hour intro to SEO training that wasn’t standing-room-only. If you are concerned, offer lunch to entice developers to attend. This will often spawn more questions and you can tell them that they’re learning less than 1% of what SEO entails, which will pique their curiosity. Often times the developers will bring it up to their managers as a topic of interest for training.
• Present at IT team meetings quarterly or monthly. Include a brief update on SEO numbers and successes followed by education on a few aspects of SEO. Most likely this will be enough of a teaser that the team (and possibly their manager) will ask for more information and training. The main reason I recommend team meetings is that they tend to be smaller and invite more conversational interaction. If department meetings work better for your company go for it, but don’t underestimate the power of intimate discussions on SEO.
• Incorporate a quick SEO update as part of project kickoffs. This way you can address the issues anticipated with a given project.
• Create a knowledge center. Load it with tutorials and documentation on SEO so that IT can access it as needed.
• Train in every interaction with IT. If you’re talking to IT about a specific issue, take 3-5 minutes of that time to back up and give the SEO 101 on that issue in the same fashion they would have seen it in a training class.
• Bring in search marketing celebrities to give the SEO training, and attract the audience. Let’s face it, external consultants have clout at many companies, and people want to hear from interesting and compelling speakers. We’re starting to see companies bringing in SEO consultants for training sessions, marketing them in advance to their employees as industry celebrities and getting employees excited to learn from their case studies, hear specific industry experiences and benefit from their technical or creative expertise. To get developers to attend, companies are promoting SEO training in the same way they promote a major author or motivational speaker coming in: email marketing to employees and signs hung around the office. When working with this type of engagement, usually the in-house SEO gives their list of challenges and topics to address, and identifies the goals and desired outcomes – we’re merely brought in as a tool for making the desired outcomes happen.

The recommendation isn’t to pick just one of the tactics above, but instead use a combination in your approach to getting SEO buy-in and training. Just like the end result of SEO, there isn’t just one thing that produces results, but rather the culmination of many different tactics which will get you higher in the priority list of IT.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for SEO site audits, SEO training and helping in-house SEO programs become a well-oiled machine that cranks out profits. The In House column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

Establishing this level of SEO buy-in throughout the organization is neither a fast nor easy task, but it’s very realistic and the ROI on this level of SEO engagement from the entire company is through the roof.

While this pro-active approach to SEO makes sense for any company, you really know it’s time to take massive action when SEO is being left out of key decisions and discussions, projects go live without any SEO input until after the launch, or SEO struggles to get changes prioritized and live on the site. When you start to face these obstacles, it’s time to start getting others to do some of the SEO work for you because you are one person trying to push the titanic in another direction – it’s just not going to happen.

Below are a few things we do with companies to identify and foster a pro-SEO culture.

• Train everyone on SEO, and how their decisions can make or break SEO. Some companies are going beyond SEO training and creating custom SEO Certification programs so that each person understands SEO for their role and knows how to address certain situations that your website faces consistently, in a search engine friendly manner.
• Take the time to learn the development life cycle in great depth to understand when requirements start/end, when documentation is created, and all of the deliverables that are passed on to the development team so that you can identify which portions of the project you need to be involved in – it’s different at every company.
• Set up lines of protection throughout the organization by creating SEO Champions within each team involved in the development life cycle. These SEO Champions are the people that represent SEO when the SEO team isn’t in the room, and act as a liaison with the SEO team.
• Create an SEO knowledge center (an Intranet website) with best practices, standards, guidelines and tutorials for quick-and-easy reference.
• Set up SEO Office Hours, where you make yourself available at the same time every day to answer any SEO questions that come up throughout the company, review wireframes, and more. The people that come again and again are likely candidates for your SEO Champions. This is most useful for larger companies with many divisions.

While there is much more that you can do to foster the pro-SEO culture at your organization, implementing these five items alone will make a huge impact on the level of SEO engagement you get from the rest of your company.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for SEO site audits, SEO training and helping in-house SEO programs become a well-oiled machine that cranks out profits. The In House column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

As a leading in-house SEO advocate, I completely agree that much of SEO can be done in-house. It’s just that when it comes to major site changes, some of the more intermediate and advanced SEO requirements get missed.

The difficulty this creates is that you don’t realize that 20% of the SEO requirements are missing until it’s too late. Unfortunately, the missing 20% is typically the most vital and requires the most re-work, and often would have added little-to-no additional development time had it been part of the original requirements.

Let’s look at an example

Last week I met with a company that firmly feels they don’t need a consultant, except for the occasional question. Their question for me was, “Why did our rankings fall?” As I dug into the answer, it became clear—they missed several intermediate-level SEO requirements in their most recent release.

Based on my assessment and discussions with them, it was apparent that their in-house SEO knowledge is very basic, and what they don’t know adds up to about 60% of SEO. They got some of the SEO requirements spot on, but some of what they missed were design decisions that were actually considered during development, but not chosen, because they didn’t realize the SEO implications of each option they were evaluating.

Those oversights will cost about $50 – $100k to remedy, not accounting for the traffic drop due to lower rankings as the changes take time to take hold. Not the position you want to be in as an in-house SEO.

How do you know if you know enough?

Only a good SEO can make that assessment for you, just like only a trained pilot can determine if someone truly knows enough to fly solo—even if they can fly great most of the time.

A growing number of in-house SEOs really do know enough to fly solo 100% of the time, but the number is small.

Here are just a few of the red flags from companies who “think” they know enough, but aren’t ready to fly completely solo quite yet:

• You have attended only 1 or 2 search marketing conferences in the past 4 years.

• You have been doing SEO for less than 2 years.
• The people who you perceive as the SEO knowledge holders haven’t done SEO full-time.
• You aren’t spending at least 1 hour per day reading what’s happening in the search marketing arena.
• You aren’t regularly giving specific SEO requirements for every unique HTML render: URL, page title tag, meta description.
• You aren’t talking directly to the people programming the site, and instead talk to their managers only. It’s not that this is a requirement, it’s just that a good SEO typically recommends things that require in-depth discussion and negotiation for technical feasibility.

How do you close your knowledge gap?

If you’re starting to realize that perhaps you don’t know as much SEO as you thought you did, don’t sweat it.

Leverage what you know, and pay only for the knowledge gap.

The best approach is to do as much as you can on your own, then have an SEO consultant review your work – much like a new programmer works under the guidance of a senior programmer. To do this, whenever you create SEO requirements or add to requirements documents, add what you think are the SEO requirements and then send those to a consultant. The consultant will review the entire document and correct any mistakes, and add what you missed.

Something like this should cost anywhere from $300-$1,000 per project, and will save you thousands, and in some cases millions of dollars in rework and traffic loss.

It’s a win-win situation: (1) You get all of the SEO requirements, (2) you aren’t paying for an SEO consultant to write up the basic items, and (3) as you review what the consultant added, your knowledge will grow.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for SEO site audits, SEO training and helping in-house SEO programs become a well-oiled machine that cranks out profits. The In House column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

Relying entirely on an agency is not an adequate strategy, for a variety of reasons.

When it comes to SEO, each site is different. Certain optimization techniques that might be ideal for one site might be entirely inappropriate for another site. As the in-house point of contact with an agency, you need to have a working knowledge of SEO so that you can bring these points up during meetings. This knowledge will also be extremely valuable if you decide to change agencies.

Your SEO agency won’t be available in every meeting, and may not be there to answer the incidental questions that arise throughout the day. Having a working knowledge will let you answer some of the most basic questions that come up day-to-day (and will save your consulting fees for the more basic SEO questions).

There are some… “interesting,” and potentially risky tactics that SEO agencies have suggested to companies—even to some very big brands. You want to have a working knowledge to know when something sounds off base, when to probe and when to seek a second or third opinion.

You may need to translate SEO-ease to your company language. As a former in-house SEO, I can appreciate the value of having a working SEO knowledge that allowed me to chime in with a translation from an SEO consultant to the lingo that we used internally. This is extremely useful when you need something to resonate to foster change.

How do you quickly learn the basics when you’re busy with a million other things? You don’t need to spend months studying SEO; you just need a quick way to gain a very strong grasp of the basics. Here are some simple things you can do to get up to speed quickly.

Engage an SEO consultant for in-house training so that you can learn the fundamentals. This could be training conducted by your current, or you could reach out to someone new for a fresh perspective, new insights and to confirm that what your agency is telling you, is in sync with others in the search engine marketing industry. When working as an in-house SEO I used multiple consultants for these very reasons. This is the approach I recommend most because it allows you to learn the concept and get immediate answers and clarification. Time investment: 1-3 days all at once.

Purchase online training programs, such as the SEMPO Institute, where you can learn SEO basics at your convenience. The SEMPO institute has a quiz at the end to help you identify how much of the material you retained, and understood. You’ll probably finish each module of the training with questions, so reach out to an SEO expert for answers and clarification. Time Investment: 1-2 hours broken into several sessions.

Read books. There are now several good books on SEO that you can purchase at the local bookstore. They aren’t going to make you a superstar SEO, but they do have plenty of information to give you the basic understandings so that you can effectively manage your SEO program. A couple to check out include The SEO Bible and Search Engine Visibility. The biggest downside of books alone is that they address very simple sites and not the more complex issues of highly robust and very dynamic sites. With every chapter your list of questions will grow, so reach out to an experienced SEO for question-and-answer sessions. Time investment: 1-2 hours of reading in several sessions.

Join SEO learning communities run by well-known search industry leaders. These are likely to be less structured than some of the other recommendations, but they do offer a wealth of information. SEObook.com is a good example. Another up-and-coming learning portal is Market Motive, where members get video, conference calls and Q&A with a faculty of A-listers in each online marketing discipline—including SEO. Members get authoritative answers from leading experts rather than novice members. Time Investment: 1-2 hours broken into several sittings.

Conferences are also great for learning SEO basics and this is what I recommend least for a quick-learn approach to bring you up to speed. Remember, though, that conferences aren’t structured to walk you through the basics so that you have a solid and thorough foundation of the SEO basics when you leave.

Take the time to learn a bit about SEO and you’ll be able to manage your agency effectively, respond to basic SEO questions, and articulate your SEO strategy to others.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for SEO site audits, SEO trainingand helping in-house SEO programs become more successful. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Many people I talk to think a superstar in-house SEO team doesn’t need an agency, and there is some truth to this. However, when you see that more could be done, but not with your limited team that is already at capacity, it’s time to think about how you could spend a few thousand dollars a month to be more productive and move your numbers even further.

Let’s take Marsha, a current client at a Fortune 500 company. Marsha is an in-house SEO that realized she either spent most of her time on action items and not selling SEO as much as she knew was needed, or she spent most of her time selling SEO to the level that was needed, but it left no time for the action items that came out of that selling.

It’s tough to strike the balance of this double-edged sword—too much of one causes a need of too much of the other.

Over the past three months, Marsha has outsourced the creation of presentations, reviews of product release documents, wire frame reviews, and more. She’s finding that now she can do both the selling and crank out the action items, increasing her SEO throughput.

What are the things that are easiest to outsource for experienced in-house SEOs? Here’s a list to get started:

• Business case reviews for SEO

• Product release documents and tech spec reviews for SEO
• Keyword research
• Strategy development
• Site audits
• Presentations on SEO topics that you just don’t have time to devote or create. Example topics that have been outsourced to SEMinhouse.com:
  • SEO copywriting

  • Duplicate content issues
  • SEO 101 for the engineering team
  • Presentation for pitching how to incorporate SEO into the existing development process workflow

If you don’t have budget for an agency, look for things that you can outline with step-by-step instructions to get other people in the company to help out, with a “tour of duty” arrangement. When working as an in-house SEO, I was able to get non-SEOs to do keyword research, copywriting, and more, with highly detailed step-by-step instructions and rigid guidelines to follow. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing, and because of the quantity of work that I was able to push through it gave a very nice lift to the SEO traffic. When time allowed, I went back and made corrections for the low hanging fruit that would create a high ROI.

Get creative and start thinking about how you could outsource the busy work to make your SEO program go even further, without adding the extra staff.

Jessica Bowman is a free agent SEO strategist available for in-house SEO training, SEO audits and helping in-house SEOs increase their throughput. The In-house column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.