It’s almost a dead certain reality that any inhouse search marketer today will need to develop new skills, if they don’t already possess them. For years, many in the industry have advocated the need to know more than SEO to be successful in SEO. In the near future that will be proven out, and skills beyond SEO will be demanded from anyone trying to make a career as an SEO. Just knowing the basics of SEO is often enough to get you started, and that will remain true – as a statement. The basics themselves will continue to expand, so this becomes a moving target. Let’s just say you cannot be too aware of emerging trends and how they impact your world.

There are undoubtedly many who could claim to have predicted the advent of social media. If you’ve got your head in the sand hoping social will go away, you should dig yourself out and take a serious look around. To state the obvious, social is here, and it matters. Years ago, however, social media was somewhat clunkier than what we enjoy today. The forerunner to today’s “social” activity was more aligned to discussion forums. Remember those? You’d go, post a question and folks would answer in line – no limits on characters.

Those who cut their teeth in those environments learned early on things such as etiquette, respect and how to play nice. Moving outside the lines back then resulted in you being banned from the community. How does this matter today? Well, when you have 140 characters to get your message across, you’d better be careful. Saying the wrong thing, or even the right things in the wrong way, can have big negative effects on your brand. The bottom line is that you need to be careful with social – mistakes in this arena hurt you immediately and can be difficult to recover from.

Mobile matters

So what does the future have in store for us? Let’s look to the mobile movement to set the stage.

To set the scene, I’ll construct a theoretical scenario:

I’m flying into Montreal and want to find a romantic restaurant for dinner on Friday evening.

Sound simple, right? You go to an engine, and search for restaurants in Montreal and look for reviews. And that would work fine, if you have your computer handy. Pretty much everyone carries a mobile device these days, though, so it’s becoming increasingly important to fit this paradigm.

In my personal world, I simple ask my phone to find me exactly what I want. It not only finds the results for me, but ranks them and shows me options to book a table at different times on my desired day. Even today, while this is nascent technology, it’s pretty good. Most time (80%) my system works. That ranks right up there against sitting at my laptop researching results. Plus, I can manage my search anywhere and when it’s most convenient for me.

How does this apply to SEO? Well, these search services, beyond being just plain cool, access dozens of search results to form their “answers” for you. The trick for an SEO then becomes to ensure your products or services rank well across many arenas of search. You simply don’t know when a query will trigger a result returning your information, and skipping things can have a big impact. Imagine if that restaurant found did not have comments and reviews enabled on their website? How would the search service know its “romantic” as I wanted?

Sure, the search systems could rely on plain old optimized content, but the signals from this social commentary mean much more to me than something an SEO stuck in a meta description tag. What if the restaurant didn’t subscribe to an online table booking service? Well, the next result pops to the top and I see a different result. To me, this matters not. I simply need one restaurant with the right atmosphere. I’m sure there are dozens or more in Montreal, so anyone skipping steps simply never appears to me as a result.

If you thought the race to rank in the top three results was tough, try being in the race where being the only one that matters. Are you building and executing a plan wide enough to encompass all the various factors that impact your organic search rankings? Better take another look at your plans, and those of others inside your organization, to make sure all efforts are commonly aligned.

So, do SEOs need to know more than just SEO tactics? Absolutely. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that to be a good SEO today, you need to be an expert in general online marketing, social media, link building, SEO, paid search, conversion optimization, copywriting and trend spotting. It’s a marathon, so pace yourself, and get learning if you don’t already know these areas in depth. The results you will achieve from being able to see the bigger picture will make all the learning worthwhile.

A practical approach to information architecture changes

Information architecture is the conceptual model around which a website is built, and forms the structural foundation by which a search engine assesses individual resources (chiefly pages), and the relationship between them. Accordingly, a change to this model has enormous ramifications for how a site is indexed, ranked and otherwise represented by the search engines.

Perhaps it is SEO that led the charge for an IA changeover in the first place – this is not uncommon, as a poor IA is one of the biggest structural impediments for SEO success. Conversely, the change may have been initiated by a different company unit for reasons wholly unrelated to search, such as the propagation of a new ecommerce platform. In either case, the in-house SEO has a role in both the architectural scheme itself, and the steps by which that blueprint is developed and transformed into reality.

This guide focuses on the practical steps involved in the planning and rollout process, rather than the design of the revised site architecture itself. Whether or not you have put together that strategic plan yourself, you will get the best results from an IA change if you take an active roll in that plan’s execution.

Come early, stay late

It is essential that you make your presence felt at every juncture in the IA changeover process. From planning to code development to testing, you will end up with the best possible site architecture for findability and high search engine rankings if (and only if)you are an active advocate for SEO at every stage.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but never trust anyone else to adequately account for the needs of SEO in an IA revamp. Even when you have provided explicit implementation guidelines, be aware that these guidelines may be subject to interpretation or, not uncommonly, misinterpretation. Stick your nose in the process and keep in there.

Make an SEO requirements checklist

Make a comprehensive checklist of SEO requirements for the new architecture to ensure you have anticipated SEO needs. This is true even if the SEO department has initiated the changeover; it is still possible to overlook some nuts and bolt issues when your focus has been chiefly on how pages are arranged and interconnected.

If you have a team, conduct at least one comprehensive brainstorming session to help come up with a list of items to be addressed. In the absence of a dedicated SEO team, augment your initial checklist by extensive reading of blogs, forums and online resources, and tap into the expertise of the broader SEO community when you can.

At a minimum, your checklist should address the following:

• File and folder naming conventions. Ensure your folder and file names are search-engine friendly, consisting of semantically meaningful keywords, with dashes used as word separators. Avoid deeply nested folders, and try as much as possible to create a sensibly hierarchical folder structure.
• Singular URIs. Any website resource, including but not limited to web pages, should only resolve under a single URI. This can be particularly challenging in some ecommerce platforms, where, in the absence of your due diligence, product pages can end up living under multiple URLs based on their parent categories. However difficult, any potential sources of duplicate content must be neutralized to produce singular URLs. While, unless absolutely necessary, you should rely on the canonical tag to solve duplicate content issues, do plan for how you plan to deploy it.
• Parameter handling. Adding a parameter is often the path of least resistance for the tracking of internal and external referrers, but can lead to duplicate content, dilute the effectiveness of your inbound links and – ironically – cause problems with tracking pages in analytics.  Your working motto should be “parameters if necessary, but not necessarily parameters.”
• Sitemap support. You will have an easier time of producing sitemaps if they are part of the information architecture plan, rather than tacked on after the fact. For any serious IA effort, a sitemap will have been produced that can aid in the construction of both XML and onsite sitemaps. For sites that appear in Google News, or have substantial video content, account for the creation of Google News and Video sitemaps respectively.
• RSS. If you have content that lends itself to syndication, account for the location, format and automated updating of RSS feeds.
• Scalability. What happens when a new product, landing page, video, upper-level category page or any other class of resource is required down the line? Often a IA revamp is required precisely because the existing architecture cannot sufficiently handle new site elements. As much as possible, try to anticipate what type of content might end up on your site in the future, and ensure that the IA is capable of integrating it.

Search friendly content management systems

Is a new content management system (CMS) part of the IA makeover? Indeed, is the introduction of a CMS or change of CMS the reason for the IA change? As an SEO be afraid. Be very afraid. Actually, some content management systems, particularly publishing platforms such as WordPress, can be very helpful for SEO. But, by and large, CMS platforms have traditionally been designed with for task execution and interactivity with databases, with something of a blind eye for SEO. This is particularly true of enterprise content management systems designed for large product or document catalogues.

Where CMS selection is part of the IA makeover process, ensure you are there at the vetting stage. Look for a CMS that, above all, shows flexibility in how content is output. I have never met a CMS vendor who has not made magnificent claims about how their product supports SEO, however much the reality differs from those claims. Due diligence here entails not only reading the specification sheets, but looking at real-life implementations of that CMS and, if at all possible, spending some time playing in a functional demonstration environment.

Once a CMS has been selected, and armed with your comprehensive list of SEO requirements, sit with your developers and determine what custom modifications are going to have to be made to the CMS to support SEO. This is important because you will need to account for that development time in the IA roadmap.  Those modifications will have to be made. To cite just one example, I worked with an enterprise CMS that happily returned a 200 response header for any file extension, as long as the root file name existed. Modifying that system so invalid file names either redirected or returned a 404 was essential to avoid duplicate content issues.

Hopefully you have both a good working relationship with your developers and a strong personality, because you must actively resist taking “no” for an answer. Two common responses to requests for modifications will be that the system was not designed to work that way, and that what you are requesting cannot be done. To the first point – no, indeed, if the CMS was designed to be SEO friendly the modification would not be necessary;  if a hack is a required and it does not adversely impact the actual integrity of the system, then a hack it is. To the second point, computer systems can almost always be manipulated to do what you need them to do, and it is more often a question of development time and costs than that a task is flat-out impossible. In the light of resource constraints, prioritize your requests, but be aware that this is the CMS you are going to have to live with.

Get access to the development environment and use it

Once one site component has been built on the back of another, changing the how that first component functions is difficult, if not practically impossible. The best way to avoid such situations is to monitor the information architecture as it is being put together by viewing it in the development environment.  Ideally, you will also want to create test pages in the authoring environment to uncover process or output issues you may not have anticipated.

There may be stages in the process where there is no meaningful output you can check, but work is moving forward. For those phases arrange to sit with your developers, where they can walk you through the latest developments. As with any project that impacts SEO, ongoing communication with key stakeholders is important.

Make an SEO migration checklist

A new site architecture, by definition, will result in existing site elements being either changed or removed altogether. You need to anticipate and enumerate what these changes will be to provide the search engines with a smooth transition from the old site to the new.

Both in the development environment and once the revised IA has gone line, use the migration checklist you have developed to ensure the new site functions as anticipated. Augment the efforts of a quality assurance and testing team, where that exists, even with your checklist in hand, they may be blind to many unanticipated SEO issues that you are only able to identify by testing.

• Redirects. In all probability, existing URLs on your site will change, and you need to create a redirect list to ensure old URLs are correctly redirected to their new locations. In many cases this will require the creation of regular expressions. Randomly test old URLs from various locations across to the site to ensure you have not overlooked anything.
• Response headers. You will, of course, want to test redirects to ensure they are using the correct redirect logic:  the preferred behavior will almost always be a 301 (permanent) redirect, and you want to be on the lookout for 302 (temporary) redirects used in error.  However, you will also want to test the response headers of new pages to ensure they return a 200 response, and invalid file names to ensure they return a 404.  To test for proper 404 behavior, try various combination based on valid file and folder names:  many CMS systems may return a blank page with a 200 rather than a 404.
• 404 and other error pages. Your existing “file not found” page, as well as other pages for server or authentication errors, may not appear or function as they did before. Test different error conditions to ensure correct behavior.
• Webmaster tools. Once your site is live, login to the webmaster consoles of the different search engines and make any required changes there, such as stipulating new sitemap locations or revised parameter handling. You will also need to ensure your selected validation method is still valid and functioning. Sometime after your new IA has been indexed, you may also need to block sitelinks that Google has extracted from the new architecture. And, of course, you will want to pay close attention to diagnostic information that is returned, such as crawl errors.

Correctly executed, a new information architecture can breathe fresh life into your SEO efforts.  Perhaps more so than any other project that impacts SEO, take all the time and effort required – even it means a few sleepless night – to derive the maximum benefit of an IA makeover, and avoid disaster.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person you’ll see constantly asking about project statuses and bubbling it up. But in the meantime, you’ll need to find out how you can deal with those resource constraints, while still remaining productive and not failing at your job.

Internal partnerships

Internal partnerships are always a big part of SEO. It is such a holistic process that you need to get everyone on your side when you’re starting a new InHouse SEO job. Just like selling the company on why it is important, you need to sell to individual teams how they are important to the holistic process.

List out all the partners that you need to make in the organization: PR/Marketing communications and how to leverage PR, Biz Dev and how they structure partnerships, engineering and how they architect the site, and the list goes on and on. Spend the down time to build and solidify those relationships and go on coffee/lunch breaks, plan happy hours, and do other intangibles that will help win people over and get things moving in the right direction.

External partnerships & business development

Sales efforts, creating partnerships, and finding business development opportunities is so important within SEO. It’s crucial to make deals with others in areas like link building and content distribution. Take a step back and look at the opportunities out there and the companies that you can parter with. Find the in’s, ask yourself “what they are lacking?”, and find a way to make it mutually beneficial for both organizations.

Getting the connections to is a big part of it, so, find out where those people are in your industry and/or vertical. What you can offer and start making those deals? What is your key value proposition? Do you have content they don’t have?

Get external partnerships headed in the right direction during resource constraints. Obviously you need to make sure that the internal resource constraints don’t affect your deals. Do this by padding estimates for deals to keep the partnership moving forward. It is better to deliver on projects early and often than late and sparsely.

Analytics and data

Something that I like to do when there is a break in the schedule is to take time to look at your InHouse SEO reporting, so you can do a little bit of an impact analysis. It gives you the opportunity to assess where you are at in your efforts and creates opportunity to reassess your overall SEO strategy.

Take the time out to do impact analysis on rankings, traffic, and conversion. Find out what you have done that is working and what isn’t. A lot of the time, it’s impossible to figure out because you have made so many changes, but, you can often bulk things together and a conclusion could be that the holistic process was the catalyst to success. That said, it would also be a good time to look at sections where you made minor changes vs. completing entire strategies and using that as a business case to move projects forward.

Roadmaps and SEO resources

Roadmap planning and project management is a place that doesn’t always get enough attention. Admittedly, I get some engrained in the tactical details sometimes, that I forget to take a step back. But, when you do have a few moments (or sometimes weeks of lag) you can leverage your assessments and find out where you are in your strategies, projects, etc. and can adjust your roadmap accordingly. Then, feel free to circulate those changes to the right people within the company, giving them an opportunity to see what is on hold and why. Furthermore, you can take the opportunity to create processes that will help your daily life when you are in full swing and you are too busy.

Along with processes that save you time and energy, you can use this as an opportunity to create SEO resources for the organization like a Wiki and/or Intranet. Putting together SEO guidelines for engineering, content, business development, PR, etc. Other things that you can do during down time, is put together presentations on trends, competitive reports, and so forth. And finally, you can distribute these resources to the teams responsible or the whole company for that matter to increase the knowledge and awareness of SEO.

Editorial and content production

While resources are constrained on the development side, you can work on other things to get those moving. For example, if you have “Product” pages on your website and you need product summaries for that. Start getting those hammered out through internal and external resources. This was a specific situation that I ran into once while waiting for a development project to start. So rather than just sit around, I reached out and had content production increased so those would be ready and just a matter of popping in.

Also, with that, blogging is a big part of SEO; start thinking of ways that you can pick up your blogging through link bait and more evergreen content throughout the site. Spend time working on an editorial and/or content production calendar that will encompass the year. Finally, you can even spend time creating a calendar of trends/etc. that is on your roadmap for content for the year.

Bottom line, from a content production standpoint, there is always something that you can do to get things moving.

Social Media marketing

If you haven’t started doing this as an SEO, it’s pretty much your best opportunity to add Social Media to the mix. Do a little research, find Social Media monitoring tools, start listening and monitoring your brand, and find out your contents reach across the social web. Find out what relevant Social Media News sites and Social Networks are out that for your company to participate in.

From there, if you have even more time, start throwing an idea or two around, maybe put together a presentation and start talking to people in the company and get a feel for how it will go over. Then, if you find a partner or two to start moving things forward, create a little internal “Social Media Team” where you can share ideas, create some business cases and even just start getting into it and deal with getting yelled at later. (You’re an SEO, you’re always getting yelled at, why stop now?!)

At the end of the day, most companies have adopted Social Media as a full on Marketing strategy, but, that doesn’t mean they are all doing it right. If you haven’t fully participated as an SEO, you better start now, so leverage free time for those activities. I don’t just mean setup a twitter account and Facebook fan page with an RSS feed. I mean get active, engaged, and start putting together actual ways the company can achieve success from an impact and reach standpoint.

Think Outside of the Box:

Get outside of your little SEO box and learn something different!

Isn’t that how we all ended up doing SEO anyway? I can’t think of a single person that I know that woke up and said, “I want to be an SEO.”

Start experimenting with something else that you might find fun and exciting. Try doing things like I mentioned above and learn a new skill set that will not only benefit your company, but will ultimately benefit you in the long run.

But, that said, Social Media is not the “end-all be-all” of new marketing tactics. There are way more things like viral marketing, buzz marketing, etc. that will get you thinking outside the box. The truth is, there is way more to viral and buzz marketing than getting a story hot on Digg and a trending topic on Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great thing to have, and I strive for achieving that every single day, but, what you want is something that will get people talking about your Brand or Product not just online, but offline as well.

Try a few things out, learn about what others are doing, start thinking outside the box and start doing something that you never thought you would be, you never know, maybe that is your next calling, just like SEO was!

Keep Moving Forward:

At the end of the day, you need to keep moving forward. These are all little things that I’ve picked up and learned how to do while I’m waiting for engineering resources to free up so I can get my strategies moving up and to the right. Trust me, I get it, the lack of resources to get projects done are painful. I’ve had to deal with MANY resource constraints, each and every time, I used it as an opportunity to better the organization and it helped increase my knowledge, skill sets, and visibility within the organization.

What are some of the things that you do when you have a pause in your strategy because of resource constraints? I’d love to hear what other InHouse SEOs do when this comes up!

Sitelinks

Sitelinks launched with wide availability in November of 2009 giving AdWords advertisers the opportunity to provide four additional content links to an existing AdWords ad. The links will only appear for ads that meet (quoting Google) “a certain high quality threshold.” Generally speaking, this means ads in a high quality-score first position spot on Google. So far, only unique brand name terms seem to be triggering these new links.

To add sitelinks to an AdWords campaign, navigate to the Campaign Settings tab and go to the “Show additional links to my site” section under “Ad extensions”. There will be space to list ten links, feel free to fill out all ten, though only four have been appearing, so concentrate on refining the first four links. These new links will appear for all qualifying ads in the campaign, so make sure they are appropriate to all the AdGroups within that campaign that would qualify. It may be a good idea to break out the AdGroup(s) you are testing into their own separate campaign.

Unfortunately, sitelinks can only be implemented at the campaign level, not to individual AdGroups (unless you place them in their own campaign.) The current campaign level management makes sitelinks fairly unscalable, but worth testing for some top AdGroups that meet the quality score requirements. In the future, it would be great to see sitelinks available at the AdGroup level as that’s much easier and more targeted from a management perspective. Also, sitelink management is not currently available via the AdWords editor tool.

Eyefortravel reported that sitelink beta advertisers saw up to a 30% improvement in click-through-rates; and, from talking to other advertisers and conducting my own testing, everyone seems to agree there is lift in CTR correlated with adding the sitelinks.

At this time, Google AdWords reports do not separate any data on the sitelinks, but hopefully this feature will be added in the future. Analytics tracking codes can be appended to sitelinks, so it is possible measure their conversion impact and traffic via an analytics tool.

Definitely follow up by running reports comparing click-through rates before and after sitelinks to measure approximate impact, and refine sitelink messaging. Listing sections of a website or popular items might be logical, but adding some snappy marketing copy to the link text seems to have a stronger positive impact on CTR than just a plain list.

Product extensions

Product extensions pull relevant Google Merchant Center products into a plus box feature at the bottom of a traditional AdWords ad. Product extensions may show the product images, pricing and titles of products that are the closest matches with an ad.

Google controls the product selection, it is currently not possible to specify which products and AdGroups should be paired. This feature is also implemented via the Campaign Settings tab. Under the “Networks, devices and extensions” section under “Ad extensions,” select the option to add product information from a Merchant Center account. If a Merchant Center account is not currently linked to the AdWords account, specify the AdWords’ account id in the Merchant Center account and that links them together. It may take up to twelve hours after this feature is selected for the additional links to begin appearing.

The reporting for product extensions is far more robust than sitelinks. Plus box impressions, clicks on offers, plus box show rate, CTR with an expanded plus box and other metrics are available via regular AdWords reports. Tracking conversion results is more convoluted since the same tracking, if any, used for the Merchant Center links will be appearing.

Other ad extensions

For advertisers with a physical store presence interested in increasing their local advertising footprint, location extensions provide enhanced listings (usually with regard to address information) for Google Maps and other local search results.

Similar to product extensions, Local Business Center accounts can be linked to a campaign in the Audience tab under “Locations.” Or an advertiser can manually enter addresses. There is additional reporting on info window opens and clicks and other map click data available in Ad Performance reports for local business ads.

Additionally, there are new ad types appearing such as contact forms and comparison ads which may give some businesses additional ad opportunities beyond the standard AdWords ads.

It’s rare, but some agencies and consultants truly do know their stuff. These folks are thought leaders and are often downright guru-ish on their topics of focus. These are the folks you need to seek out and partner with if you want these very specialized areas of work to be successful for your site.

I’ll probably surprise many folks who know me by even suggesting that seasoned search and online marketers would benefit from seeking help in these select areas. Calling on a agency to help with everyday SEO work, or in managing a PPC campaign is in many cases, a waste of time, resources and money. Too many agencies exist and add no value to their clients’ effort.

In the following instances, however, it can often easily be justified to call in outside help. I’m not saying here that your in-house resources are unable to guide in these areas, but let’s face it – unless you have lots of people on your team, it’s tough to find the time to get the work done. Curious now as to which areas I think make sense to often outsource?

• Link Building
• Social Media
• Conversion Optimization

If you don’t understand the massive value in optimizing each of these disciplines, drop me a note and I’ll send you an Archie comic… In short, stop reading. For those game to stick around, let’s dig in and examine the trio above.

Link building

No contest, hands down one of the single biggest things you can do to help your organic rankings is to accumulate a good collection of useful inbound links. What happens though, if you simply don’t want to wait for those links to build up over time? Well, you hire an expert to guide your link building program.  Yes, a link building program. No slap-dash approach works here. No short cuts either. It takes work, a reasonable approach and refined expectations. You should not think that links alone will rescue a failing site, but boy, can they lend a hand. And not just any random links, but honest-to-goodness relevant links from respected websites.

These links are votes after all, so really, why not shoot for the best ones? Now best can be loosely translated to “most relevant,” so don’t go thinking you need to score links form the biggest names in your vertical. Approach this on a page-by-page basis and plan your approach carefully. In the end, when well executed, your web of inbound links will gracefully spread value not only across your site, but deep within it, all form a collection of respected websites.

The challenge with this is in the management of this program. How do you determine who to approach?  How do you find them? How do you convince them to drop that golden little link back to one of your pages? That’s the domain of the link building expert.

Social media

Right. Everyone has an opinion. Most of them are wrong. Not everyone can succeed in social media marketing. It’s not as simple as you think. If your approach is to simply start with the sales pitches, call failblog right now and sign up to be tomorrow’s cover story. Even knowing this tidbit pales in comparison to the arcane art of coaxing conversions form the world of social engagement. Select few people are truly expert at this art. The real question is this: do you think you know enough about this medium to plan, build and execute – successfully, mind you – a social media campaign that can consume time, resources and money?

There are many “how to” articles around the Internet explaining how to do everything from building a social media tracking dashboard to how to hone your “voice” and refine your “pitch.” Many are actually useful, most are snake oil. Can you tell the difference? My hat’s off to you if you are able to manage this effort successfully from front to back. For many, the one item they struggle to overcome is not knowledge, it’s time.

You would think that in a world that values seeing messages where the average length is measured in characters, not words, that the time component would be easily managed. Not so. Ensuring your message comes across clearly in the often truncated world of social media marketing takes a skill and muscle memory not “suddenly learned.” Building the competency requires an investment of time. Equally time consuming is monitoring results. Just checking your logs for referrals misses the point. The real value form social is a balance between engagement and conversions.

Truly, social media marketing is the domain of an expert. Can most of handle the basics?  Sure. Then again, most of us can put paint on a canvas. Only a true artist makes art, however.

Conversion optimization

Street luge. Skydiving. Bungee jumping. Running with the bulls. Oktoberfest (in Munich.) What the heck to these things have in common with conversion optimization? Simply put, each is an experience, that once had, will change your life.

If you have never had a conversion optimization expert do work on your website, you’ll be shocked at the difference they can make. I recently had the pleasure of meeting some truly deserving guys of the moniker “experts” from the UK, while writing my latest book. The work they did for clients resulted in simply amazing results. These clients are household names, too, so it’s not like they were unknowns without resources at their disposal.

The bottom line here is that having a professional conversion optimization expert guide you can make a huge difference in the number of lost sales you see and a big increase in revenues. These folks cover everything from your product pages to your shopping cart and even on out to your thank you follow-up email. There are so many areas to think of and cover, again, many companies feel the best way forward is to invest in dedicated services to help with this unique aspect of your site.

Clearly with success being in the details, these three areas deserve the best you can afford. If you’re not up for hiring external help, that’s fine. Just go in with your eyes open around how much work is involved, how much time that will take up and where and when you should expect results.

The bottom line is this: say you needed surgery on your eye. You wouldn’t ask your general practitioner to perform it would you? Unlikely you’d do it yourself, too. No, those options are obviously the wrong choice in the face of calling an expert in the field and seeing things clearly in the end.

I should start by noting that “agency” is all-encompassing term, and that companies of any size are increasingly being approached by a wide variety of vendors offering search marketing products and services. These may include link builders, content providers and tool developers, in addition to dedicated SEO agencies or marketing agencies with a search component.

Given that you have an in-house SEO program can these proffered products and services be dismissed out of hand as either unnecessary or redundant? Absolutely not.  For any number of reasons – a lack of internal resources, perceived competitive advantage of adopting a new technology, cost savings – it may benefit an in-house SEO program to work with external vendors. And as the in-house expert, you have a responsibility to give any proposals due consideration.

For the competent SEO, fielding and responding to a vendor or agency pitch should not present significant problems. When that same pitch is made directly to your CEO, head of IT or other management stakeholder it can, however, present a significant challenge.  On one hand, an interloper might cast unfounded doubt on the focus or effectiveness of your SEO efforts. On the other, an executive might be seduced by an illusory promise of search engine domination. Both can deplete your resources and hard-won credibility, and need to be dealt with deftly.

My robot thinks your SEO sucks

“Your title is 50% relevant. … Your SEO score is 70%.”

If there is any doubt where this unsolicited email is going, it is clarified by the next paragraph, which goes on to say that “if you can stomach more bad news about what your site needs” then their sales team would be delighted to talk with you.

As absurd as this may seem to the seasoned search professional, a missive like this can raise doubts about your competency in the mind of an executive with little SEO knowledge, as evidenced by the fact that this was forwarded to an SEO from his employer. You need to nip this in the bud. Explain, caustically, that this was an automated message generated on the basis of a script with no actual insight regarding your site’s structure, business goals or the or industry space it occupies, let alone any knowledge of search marketing efforts already underway.

If it was even produced as a result of a robotic assessment… I’m 50% certain that 70% of site owners receive this exact email.

The blind pitching the blind

That same uneducated executive may also be susceptible to pitches that rely upon an antiquated, inaccurate or flat-out wrong-headed understanding of SEO best practices.  This is often the case with agencies that do not actually specialize in search marketing, but nonetheless cast themselves as SEO experts. This is as good an opportunity as any to embark on educating your CEO, as a rebuttal of suggested tactics is the prudent course.

No, the secret to our success is not six percent keyword density for a core term on every page. And yes, our link-building scheme is considerably more expensive than the proposed reciprocal link exchange that has been recommended, but it’s considerably more effective.

Magic bullet syndrome

There are many competent and enterprising search marketing agencies out there, and they well approach your boss with a very professional audit, itemized recommendations and a price tag. Perversely enough, the fact that an agency attaches a price tag to a proposal is often very attractive to marketing executives, even when that proposal mirrors the requirements that have already identified in-house. It creates the appearance that your search challenges are easy to solve:  all I need to do is write a check.

Of course, just because this advice is coming from an outsider, it does not mean the solution being offered is going to be any easier to implement than it is in-house. Indeed it is likely to take longer, be more difficult to accomplish and be more expensive. It may well be that the excited executive is unaware that you are already addressing issues that the agency has identified, but that the process requires continuing perseverance, not the wave of a magic wand.  Bring him or her up to speed, and be sure to enumerate any resource issues or lack of internal support that may be impeding your progress.

A nasty variation on this theme is the miraculous technology solution. Forget building links and content, quit spending precious time on keyword research: plug, play, and watch the search traffic pour in! I was not long ago approached by a vendor peddling a product that promised I would “never have to do on-page SEO again.” Perhaps smoke and mirrors to an SEO, but potentially tantalizing to a senior manager as a quick, cost-efficient fix. De-constructing the product in the context of a necessarily holistic SEO strategy usually a sufficient response.

The risks of a risk-free guarantee

Executives can get downright giddy when they have been offered a “risk-free” SEO guarantee. You don’t pay unless you see an increase in search traffic, or the vendor is paid in proportion to a site’s increased search traffic, either at a set rate or through revenue sharing (this is becoming increasingly popular from vendors of SEO tools and content optimization overlays.)

If you have a viable in-house SEO program that is actually rolling out optimization improvements on an ongoing basis, you should never allow an outside agency or vendor to be paid on the basis of improvements to organic search engine rankings or traffic. The reason, obviously, is that it is impossible to determine which efforts resulted in improved organic search metrics. In fact, if your in-house SEO work continues at pace, your outside SEO services provider could do nothing at all and still be rewarded under such an arrangement.

Again, this is not to say that you should not avail yourself of such services if you deem them useful and necessary, and if you have the budget to support them. This is not uncommonly the case where an SEO department is understaffed, but lacks either the funds or desire to add new hires. But pay by the hour, the link, a set contract price or some other basis that is independent of search-derived traffic.

With any luck your organization boasts a competent management team, with a good collective grasp of SEO and faith in your professional abilities. Do not be chagrined, however, if you must occasionally defend yourself in the light of vendors that cast doubts on the effectiveness or efficiency of your SEO program. The same expertise that has you guiding your company’s search marketing efforts is the key to weathering such storms.

Research is key

This is true for every form of marketing activity. When you are engaging in Internet marketing, you have to do the research about the industry, the audience, and so forth. More specifically, when it comes to social media, it is researching topics, keywords, conversations, etc. Finding out where people are having conversations about your vertical and your brand will help you in planning out your strategy/campaign. Your vertical might have conversations happening the most somewhere on Twitter, or on a [vertical specific] forum.

Some tools which could help you do this are Radian 6, Biz360, and Trackur, to name a few. You could also just search for some communities (go figure, right?). For example, I searched for the best niche social media sites and look at that, our good friends over at 10e20 showed up as the top result for the query: “best niche social media sites”.

Get a feel for the community

So, you’ve done the research, you would think that traditionally, the next thing you would want to do is start tracking goals and ROI. Wrong! That would be a huge mistake, because, you still have no idea of the potential within the community. You have questions to answer still – how active is the community? How much traffic do they get? Who goes there? You might have some data, but you need to physically interact with the community at this point.

Now, don’t start to go crazy and jump in head first; instead, start voting in Social News sites, start interacting on blogs and forums. Figure out who the users are, find out if they are completely transparent in what they do.

After you’ve done this, make sure that you have participated and researched enough to set forth some goals going forward. By now, I have voted on many articles, commented on lots more, and even submitted a few. Yet, I still have a lot to learn, but, it gave me enough of an understanding to assign some goals.

Setting some goals and ROI

It’s time to take your feet out of the water and get them closer to the fire. Now you need to track what you are doing and get a real understanding for what your goals are and what your organization is going to use to measure the effectiveness of a strategy or campaign, here are a couple of mine:

• Engagement - Increase the overall amount of engagement via our content on our website and/or across the Social Web. Basically, increasing things like Twitter mentions, interactions on Facebook, comments across the Social Web, and amount of votes in Social Media.
• Overall Online Visibility - This is more of a qualitative number, but, making sure that content is seen by bloggers and journalists in given verticals.
• Increased Fans, Traffic, and Links - All valuable and quantitative metrics that you can track. Number of fans/followers across the Social Web, the amount of traffic via all social media channels and/or broken out by channel, and finally, the number of relevant links that the content brought to help SEO.

Create a strategy

There are three main things that are necessary in the strategy: the research on communities, the goals and roi you expect to achieve, and finally, the game plan for how you plan to achieve those goals. Think of it as a “Social Media Playbook” that is ever evolving and changing based on the daily tactical work.

Mix it up: Don’t worry about being perfect up front with the strategy you develop. But do make sure you get something down that you can reference when necessary and build out through the motions.

Unleashing your tactical game plan

Your game plan isn’t just going to be submitting a bunch of content to social news sites and being an attention whore on Twitter. The game plan should consist of a few key elements that will help you gain visibility. The 3 key elements to start with: making friends within the communities and letting them know you are there, voting on content, and engaging in the community (comments, tweets, wall posts, etc.).

Mix it up: Now, if you are sitting there complaining about how much time this may take, this might not be for you, but even so, think through this – how many times do you find yourself idle in meetings or throughout the day that you could actually be participating and active in communities. I’ve been in many meetings where I could pay attention while also voting on stories and adding new friends.

Social news sites

Take a minute and make sure that your content is ready: do you have internal links to help your SEO strategy? Did you put in a call to action at the end of the article? After that, to start getting content submitted, you are going to need to do it yourself, so create a “submission plan” of sorts leveraging the research you did above to find out where it would do well:

Social networks

Engage and interact with your fans, friends, and followers. Provide them content that is relevant to your industry, your business, etc. Think through some search terms that would make sense to track on Twitter? What are some questions that you can ask your fans to gain insight and/or increase engagement? Example from our recent conversations on Twitter:

Mix it up: Create questions in advance that you can post throughout the week or schedule using tools like Easytweets. Use tools like Seesmic Desktop you can create a search column to track keywords on the fly.

Measure, adjust, rinse, repeat

Did you achieve your goals? Was it mixed into your day and/or strategy effectively? Where could you have improved the effectiveness of the overall campaign? What were your metrics overall? And, did you hit your targets? Find areas that you can help yourself within the mix and start making changes to those and fixing that where possible.

Keep the conversation going, follow me on twitter: @tonyadam

Address Bing

If you aren’t running an active paid search account with Microsoft’s Advertising adCenter, 2010 is the time to start. The latest comScore figures (December 2009) report Bing has now reached over 10% in share, closing in on Yahoo’s 17%. If the two year trend of Bing stealing Yahoo search share continues, expect to see your Yahoo paid search account traffic and conversion volumes decline.

You’ll need to have a marketing strategy to recoup Yahoo paid search losses. Shift some of your time and resources to getting your paid search keywords on Bing to take advantage of the traffic shift. The adCenter desktop tool makes porting over existing accounts and making easy find and replace updates efficient.

In terms of the Microhoo deal, the latest timeline suggests that paid Microsoft/Bing results will being appearing on Yahoo in early 2011 in major markets with the goal of all results by early 2012. While 2011 is still a year away, there’s no time like the present to start preparations for this transition. The announcement of their deal is already six months old, so see how time flies?

Bing’s not going anywhere in 2010, Microsoft will likely continue their advertising push to steal search share, and Yahoo is unlikely to aggressively respond to win significant share back. Coupled with the imminent syndication of Bing results on Yahoo, marketers should start treating Bing as they would Yahoo in terms of search priorities and resources.

Google is the priority

Despite lots of news and noise about Bing and Yahoo, Google is still any search engine marketer’s main priority. Google maintains a commanding share of the search market (65-67% in December 2009) and the market leader position for paid search, so no surprise that the bulk of any paid search marketer’s time should be spent on AdWords, as that’s likely responsible for the majority of search marketing traffic and conversions.

In the flurry of activity around other projects and news, it is always a good idea to remind oneself of that. There’s always more to do with AdWords: test content targeting, placement targeting, sitelinks, target devices like iPhones, creating mobile ads (more on that below), image ads, video ads, and classic strategies like simply testing some new ad text.

Time for mobile?

As more innovative devices (like the Nexus One) hit the market the mobile buzz, and search share, is increasing. Get in on the ground floor by kicking off a mobile search strategy in 2010. For many search engine marketers this might largely consist of lobbying for a mobile friendly version of your organization’s website, or for better reporting and tracking on an existing mobile site.

Marketers lucky enough to have a functional mobile site should start testing mobile paid search campaigns to increase direct traffic. Particularly focus on messaging, a mobile user will likely respond to a different ad text than a user at their computer – a last minute, local emphasis might garner a better response.

If your organization has a mobile application, consider search strategies to promote the application. Maybe a paid search campaign to encourage downloads is worth pursuing. A strong search presence for an application can also boost PR coverage as most reporters and bloggers conduct searches as part of their research.

Work on yourself

Every day, in every way, you are becoming a better search engine marketer. Think about new ways you can add value to your organization’s in-house marketing efforts. Is anyone committed to working on your organization’s social media presence? Becoming the Twitter, Facebook, blogger and all around social media guru is a great way for an in-house search engine marketer to increase their profile and responsibilities. As more Twitter and Facebook links populate the search result pages, this will only help your existing search efforts.

Increase your industry knowledge. Bravo for kicking this one off already by being a reader of Search Engine Land! There are tons of other great search engine resources out there on the web, almost an overwhelming amount. Take some time now to pick a reasonable number of resources that speak to your level of expertise and that you enjoy reading, and add them to your RSS reader or bookmark them to a folder and take a look through them once a week (my favorite Friday lunch or listless afternoon activity.)

Consider participating in an organization like SEMPO or your local digital marketing association to network with your peers. Definitely try to secure budget to attend at least one search engine marketing conference this year. Your greatest asset is your expertise, so kick it up a notch in 2010!

Now, for those who have already delivered training, I want you to think back. Ask yourself this question: “Did it work?”

If you’re inclined to simply say yes, and feel you’re a rock star because you held up your end of the deal (you did the training) – think again.  Unless every single person left your session and immediately changed their work habits to incorporate the suggestions you made in the training session, your work is far from done.

Bueller…Bueller?

In fact, this might just serve as a wakeup call, offering insight into all those people around you. Pay attention. If someone takes your training, then does not change how they work, either they weren’t paying attention, or you were ineffective.

I’m not talking about them changing their habits the very next day either. I’m talking longer term. You need to see that the training had enough impact to get people to change enough of what they do that the product changes and the results can be tracked. In short, is there a direct path from your training session to the bottom line results?

In many cases, people will sign up to attend training sessions because they want the cookie. They know training is valuable and if they go, it breaks up their daily routine. It also looks good to attend training sessions. There’s nothing malicious in this thinking either, it’s a common rut many people fall into. Sadly, those people being in that rut can lead to your training failing to generate successful actions in the real world.

Changing the course of SEM training

It is critical that before you embark on any search marketing training session, you set clear goals for that training. If it is simply to raise awareness of the topic, then you have an easy goal. If the goal is tied to a numerical result or KPI, things get more complicated. The end result, though, should be that each training session has attached goals. You’ll learn by doing, so start today following this line of thinking.

An important point to note is that having goals attached makes planning training more complicated. You will undoubtedly need input or signoff from others in the company to accomplish many goals you might attach to a training session, so before you announce the session, you’d better get signoffs in place.

In such a case, having the signoff in place sets the tone for the training; namely, that those attending are expected to learn a new skill and implement it. Tracking will be in place, and results are expected.  Creating and sharing this message before the training session will help ensure those attending do so in an active manner. At the very least, this will dissuade those simply looking to claim a cookie from attending.

Evaluating your training sessions

The next most logical step, therefore, is to monitor the results. I’ll pause here to mention one small, but important fact you will discover.  That is, do not expect this entire process to be seamless or easy to manage. As with any training, you’ll need to do follow up with people and answer random questions as people try to implement their new knowledge.

Expect after the training ends to field emails, calls and drop-ins while people gain confidence. You will need to be friend, coach and task-master to move people through their new work items in a speedy manner. During this entire time, you’ll also be keeping an eye on your metrics to track actual results. Early on, you should start seeing indicators either positive or negative.

Assuming things go well, and work follows training and positive results stem from this, even now your work is not done.

Like many skills, people become complacent with them. You’ll need to factor this into your training schedule to offer refresher courses. This is especially true when people move between jobs or even when the engines make algorithmic changes. Is once a year enough of a schedule to drive positive results on an ongoing basis, or do you need to offer quarterly refresher training?

Never assume that people, once active on doing work your way, will just always continue to follow your pattern. And be ready for push back around taking too much time for training. If you have your Executives behind you in terms of supporting your overall organic search program, then you’ll have their backing as you explain how your training has to mirror changes in the industry.

If an engine changes their algorithm a week after your training session, it’s no good waiting another 11 months for your once a year training session to update, alert and retrain the folks making SEO happen on your website.

Just make sure everyone understands the transient nature of changes in search marketing and they’ll understand your need to do training on a higher frequency.

The bottom line with all of this is that you need to perform training on an ongoing basis, often with the same faces in the room, multiple times. By ensuring your training is fresh, you maximize the chances of people performing search optimization in the correct way.

What lies ahead for the in-house search marketer in the decade ahead? In a word: more. The proliferation of technology platforms and social networks continue to spawn new search opportunities, at the same time that search providers innovate furiously in order to capture or consolidate market share. The challenge for the in-house SEM will be to stay on top of these changes while continuing to profitably optimize for “traditional” search—and still find time for more mundane activities, like eating and sleeping.

More convergence with marketing units

Savvy in-house search marketers have long understood that the marketing silos typical of bigger firms have resulted in missed search optimization opportunities, and have remedied this by taking a more holistic approach to in-house marketing activities. Indeed, the ability to integrate aspects of public relations, advertising and affiliate marketing into search marketing strategies is one of the benefits of possessing an in-house search marketing program.

This will be an increasingly important principle to pursue as, among other things, the search engines make efforts to improve the prominence and relevance of real-time search results. Many organization’s Facebook updates and tweets, for example, are already becoming fodder for search results, demanding that social media marketing units—where they exist—coordinate strategy with SEM.

More convergence with technology units

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a well-structured site for search had valid HTML, a heading coded as H1, and well-formed title and meta tags. No longer. As more and more websites compete for a growing but still finite amount of search traffic, organizations that are able to integrate search-friendly technologies quickly and cleverly are going to have an important edge.

On one hand, the in-house SEM will continue to see his or her time coordinating the deployment of new and changing technical search requirements with coders and developers. The rate of innovation by the search engines will make this a substantial challenge. XML sitemaps, now in the “best-practice” column on most SEMs’ checklists, demonstrate what a challenge it can be keeping up with search engine changes. Introduced in 2005, their use is widespread but still not ubiquitous. The same is true even of Google News sitemaps (2006), which are arguably more important for Google News-indexed sites, while few sites to date have availed themselves of Google Video sitemaps (2007) despite the obvious potential benefits.

On the other hand, it will be ever more important to interact at a strategic level with developers and designers to build sites that are optimized for things like real-time and mobile search. As search evolves, so must search-friendly information architecture. There is, perhaps, no greater sign that in-house SEM has come of age than the job title “SEO Developer” starting to appear in company directories.

More types of search ads

Aside from the competition born of tacking several zeros to those original 350 AdWords customers, today’s paid search marketer now has to contend with a dizzying array of advertising formats and models. Video ads, mobile search ads, Facebook ads, CPA ads, and product ads—including the whole Bing Cashback model—have all made life more complicated for search engine marketers. Not only do new search types typically involve learning a new interface, but require different optimization strategies and the development of different key performance indicators to measure return on investment. A web-based text ad and an ad focused on local search for mobile devices definitely require different approaches.

The array of advertising options related to search, social networks and semantic technologies will continue to grow in number as technology changes and different sectors, like social media, mature. In the time since I started this article Google released Pay-Per-Call, and had been observed testing AdWords lead generation capture forms. Paid search marketers in the decade ahead will be challenged to learn and integrate new advertising types while controlling their ad spends, and keeping their advertising efforts profitable.

More types of search

As an example of how fast things are moving, just since I started this article Google has launched Near Me Now, which displays nearby restaurants, coffee shops and bars based on a mobile user’s geographic location. Even for those who were actively optimizing for Google’s Local Search for Mobile (introduced September 2009) this represents a change that for which new strategies must be devised. An SEO in 2000 had to optimize for misspellings; with the advent of mobile-based voice search SEO tactics now have to target misspeakings as well.

As devices develop optimization techniques must evolve to address these developments. While that has always been true, the rate of innovation in search has increased dramatically. The types of verticals in “universal search” (now old hat, introduced by Google in May 2007) will also morph and expand, as recently demonstrated by the inclusion of tweets by Google and Bing.

More in-house search stars?

The best-known figures in the search marketing community—names like Greg Boser, Dave Naylor, Jill Whalen, Barry Schwartz and Danny Sullivan—have typically come from the agency and consultancy side of the business. While the industry has not been without prominent in-house leaders, such as Marshall Simmonds of New York Times and About.com fame, in-house search marketers are still minority members of the “SEO rock star” pantheon. As more big brands seriously commit to search marketing expect to see senior in-house SEOs, such as Brent D. Payne (Tribune Company) and Dan Perry (Turner Broadcasting), gain greater industry visibility.

More work

Pity the in-house search marketer working without a team, except in the smallest and most singularly focused of companies. In-house search marketing departments are unlikely to see increases in budgets commensurate with the rate of change in the industry. This will force many in-house search marketers to be more selective in their optimization efforts, and increasingly outsource specialty optimization and paid search tasks. There are exciting, challenging and demanding times ahead: remember to sleep.