Are you an in-house search marketer? If so, SEMPO would like your participation in its second annual in-house salary survey. This survey is for in-house providers only but is not limited to SEMPO members.

The 21-question survey takes 10 minutes to complete, and will be open until February 20th.

In-house search marketers are doing quite well financially, according to salary survey results released by SEMPO today. Respondents reported a wide range of salaries, from virtually minimum wage to those exceeding several hundred thousand dollars per year, with the average falling in the $60-70,000 range. And not surprisingly, experience was a factor in how much search marketers earned.

“While there are a good number of six figure salaries people need to understand all the salary levels represent reality,” said Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s In-House SEM Committee and Lead SEO Program Manager with Microsoft. “SEMs need to be realistic about their careers and plan as they would for any viable career opportunity,” says Forrester. “On the other hand, if you’re ready for a six figure job, go get it! There are a lot of good jobs out there.”

Another key finding was that roughly one third of SEMs are managing monthly budgets in excess of $200,000. “We anticipated a lower ceiling of monthly spend closer to the $100,000 range so we were pleasantly surprised,” said Forrester.

More salary and budget findings from the survey can be found on the SEMPO website.

If you’re an in-house search marketer, you may have had the experience of awakening one morning and realizing that you have a legitimate career. Wow! Your high school guidance counselor never mentioned this gig, I’ll bet. Only a handful of years ago, in fact, this career path never existed. Most folks would have simply labeled you a computer nerd—today they know better. You are not a nerd. You are a geek—a search geek, in fact.

Your mornings are spent staring intently at a curious mix of screens, surrounded by fresh coffee, stale coffee, and a few books with odd titles. On some tabs—you know they’re tabbed because you use Firefox—are myriad websites sharing the very latest news on the world of search engines. Everything from what people thinks makes them tick, to who bought whom last night while you slept for 3 hours… shame on you.

Tab over a bit and you’ll start to see the vast array of online tools available to you, a career search geek. Everything from XML sitemap builders to keyword research tools. Heaven help you the day you forget a password—you’ll be all theory and no action.

Colleagues swing by and ask what’s new, only to regret it seconds later as you launch into why keyword research should be the cornerstone of any project and how the latest tweaks to Google’s algorithm not only help sort more relevant results, but last night helped you fine-tune the perfect latte on your countertop Easy Latte 2000.

“There goes Jimmy again, speaking that weird language of his,” they whisper as they scatter like spiders on a fresh sitemap.

From time to time you may wonder about your future. Is there truly a future in being a search geek? I mean, it’s not like colleges and universities around the world are clamoring to add any kind of search training to their curriculum. In fact, since the last internet boom in the late ’90’s, the number of Ecommerce-related degrees have fallen dramatically. Sadly, those still around today are not really what you needed to get to where you are, anyway.

In the end, you’re determined to make a career of search. You’ve been to the conferences and heard folks talk about so-and-so, who just snagged a big 6-figure job at *insert brand name here.* You immediately take stock. You’ve got the same experience he has, plus you’ve taken online training that helped you learn the basics of many concepts. Your quest is then, from that moment forward, cemented and aligned in one direction:

You shall have a lucrative, successful career in search!

Manage your digital footprint

If that’s your goal, it’s time to get smart quickly. As a savvy search geek, you know that pages can float online almost forever. So, what are you going to do about those newbie questions you asked years ago in an online forum? You know, the ones that showed you didn’t know a meta tag from a price tag. This is your digital footprint, or part of it, anyway. How you manage this is becoming more important every day. More and more employers are finding it helpful to quickly search a prospective employee’s name to see what comes up.

Unless you’re a celeb, don’t expect any volume of searches on your own name, but I always think it’s a safe idea to own your own name as a domain—www.yourfullnamehere.com. At best, it might prove useful. At worst, it prevents anyone else from having it and perhaps harming your rep. Obviously if you have a common name, it’ll be harder, but with common names comes what I like to think of as SERP static—there are so many items being returned that it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees. Even if you cannot cover this base, there are so many others coming up in the results that you get lost in the mix. Anonymity can be safety.

The next level in managing your digital footprint deals with what you do right now online. Do you have multiple user names—one for every forum? How about when you join someone’s blog? Might want to rethink that and just go with one user name everywhere or even just your own name, plain and simple. This will dramatically help people understand it is you who’s speaking. In the case of a common user name (one you use everywhere, and is unique to you), it can help a potential employer quickly locate good things about you. If you give them the user name and suggest they search it, the results showcase your knowledge sharing and ability to interact with others easily.

Ramp up your networking

Having a common user name or using your own name helps immensely in networking, too. These days, with sites like LinkedIn allowing us to reach out to others at an unprecedented rate, having that singular presence allows you to easily gain credit for all the good things you’ve done online. Offline networking still remains one of the best ways to help build your career, though.

No doubt about it—buy a person a drink (or several) at a conference and you can expect to get a return on that email you need to drop this week. Spend some time in the lounges at the conference hotel and mingle. Yes, it’s like elementary school all over again, just not as cerebral. Seriously, I’ve met some great folks by approaching a knot of people at the bar and offering to buy a round. It’s a pretty cheap way to meet people and build relationships.

Join a group, too. By joining groups, either online, locally, or through places like Facebook, you are immediately surrounded by fellow search geeks every bit as into things as you are. The relationships you form here could be invaluable in your future. I’ll give you a personal example:

I recently accepted a new job. Still in-house, but with a big name company. Months ago when I was considering the opportunity, I asked someone I trusted, and who I knew had experience, if he thought the position was good and worth pursuing. His only warning came that the company, being large, sometimes took longer to get things done than smaller companies. This advice floated back through my addled brain last week when I was stressing about the length of time it was taking to get an offer letter. His advice allowed me to see things from another, more experienced, angle, which was just what I needed at the time.

It was also nice to hear that when I decided to leave my old employer and was waiting for this opportunity to be finalized, that if I ever needed a job, I had several—that’s the power of a good network. Treat it like a Chia pet—a bit of nurturing every now and then and it’ll grow and flourish, being there when you need it—not that anyone needs a Chia pet, but you get the idea!

Seek out training and experience

I tend not to worry too much about the educational components asked for in job postings. After all, it’s not like any of us learned search marketing at university. We learned by doing, and if we were really lucky, came across a course to study that helped point the way. It’s the ability to do the job successfully that employers want. More and more are realizing this, though job postings continue to show specific degrees listed as “required”—I say if you’ve got everything except that degree, go for it. If they don’t want your experience because of the paper, their loss. You will need some form of post-secondary education, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like trying to snag the Chief of Surgery job sporting a high-school diploma.

Manage your expectations

Armed with all this information, what’s your next move? To hit the job boards? Maybe, but better take a minute to set your expectations to a lower level. Best to start off by reviewing things like what types of experience and lengths of experience do employers typically want in a search geek. What titles tend to float around? No sense wading in with one year’s experience and trying to find a directorship. Don’t simply set your eye on a big salary, either. Consider the broader range of issues at hand—benefits, perks, salary, signing bonuses, performance bonuses, savings plans, stock options, and don’t forget more immediately beneficial items like work-from-home options and extended health benefits options.

Most of all, you should approach your career as what you’ll be doing between now and when you retire—assuming you don’t contract a computer virus and reboot early. With that much time to fill, building a solid career takes planning, forethought, and effort. It also takes knowing how to build relationships and being honest with yourself. If you need to wait a couple years to build more experience, don’t sweat it, it’s worth it.

There are quite a few six figure search jobs out there now—many open as I type this article. Be realistic about building your knowledge base and your resume, and any one of them could be yours.

Duane Forrester is an in-house SEM, sits on the Board of Directors with SEMPO and can be found at his blog where he speaks about online marketing and monetizing websites. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

I must admit, I wasn’t very perceptive when I received my first in-house SEO prospect call back in 2000. The caller recognized the value of his organic search results and the business need for integrating SEO functionality internally. I did not. That’s because in those days, I thought it made much more sense to outsource.

Rewind to salad days

We were green in those days. As Shakespeare once said, “my salad days,/When I was green in judgment, cold in blood…” In the late 1990s, we were at the height of the cloaking controversy; white and black hat didn’t exist yet. We didn’t have any proven guidelines for natural search optimization in those days, and all practitioners were going in different directions; many were shooting from the hip.

Maybe I blew it when I told the caller, “You’ve got to be kidding…salaries and expenses to operate an in-house team will cost you double compared to vendor service pricing…you’ll play catch-up for months and years.”

It seemed like good reasoning at the time. As optimization vendors and practitioners, we could produce volumes of redundant tasks across hundreds of clients and dozens of categories based on wins or losses from month to month. The search engine environment was unstable; we’d wake up one day (about every 45-60 days) to find all of our optimization work gone and no longer visible in the search engines. We’d change our method or script, and within a week, we’d be back up and running with great results. There was value in our vendor/client relationships, offering quick wins in a system of monitoring and adjustments as needed.

As natural search began to stabilize and brands continued flocking online, the high-demand for reliable, compliant SEO and improved natural search results grew. As this growth continued, several practitioners popped up under the radar in the reliable, compliant SEO space. Pretty soon, they weren’t under the radar any more, and eventually, most practitioners saw the value of wearing a white hat.

Fast forward to 2007

Today, we have ten years of tested and proven, reliable, and compliant SEO methodologies, documented and ready for transfer to online businesses. Although two-thirds of American businesses currently perform SEO tasks in-house, much of the knowledge base is in the hands of a few dozen experienced practitioners on the outside.

In today’s marketplace, it’s smart for mid-to-large company SEO/SEM in-house teams and managers to seek the most current, reliable information when it comes to improving natural search results on a daily basis. In fact, my big clients won’t let me publicize who they are for fear their competitors will follow suit. They know that SEO/SEM training puts them ahead of the game. Tapping into the resources of experienced practitioners willing to transfer SEO/SEM knowledge is both wise and valuable, especially when the in-house trainer brings in additional experts, adding to the buildup of resources and networking opportunities.

It’s all in the training

In case you’re not convinced that SEO/SEM training can give you an edge, the stats from MarketingSherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide are telling:

• Outsourcing gets marketers an average 110% lift in overall site traffic
• In-house search marketers get a mere 75% overall traffic lift

I continue to advise CEOs and senior managers that the reason for this dismal statistic is the lack of reliable, compliant SEO training for in-house teams. It really doesn’t matter how much experience or lack of experience you have; we all continue to need training throughout our careers, and success is all about lifelong learning.

• According to Wikipedia, lifelong learning “is the concept that ‘It’s never too soon or too late for learning,’ a philosophy that has taken root in a whole host of different organizations.”
• According to WorldBank.org: “The latest knowledge and successful practices of planning and implementing education for lifelong learning suggest that lifelong learning is more than just education and training beyond formal schooling. A lifelong learning framework encompasses learning throughout the life cycle, from birth to grave and in different learning environments, formal, non-formal and informal.”
• Terence Burton, president of The Center for Excellence in Operations, wrote an article still worth reading in Intelligent Manufacturing, July 1995, titled: Are You Afraid of Change?

Juliette Love, author and motivational speaker, said it best: “You are only as good as the latest information and your ability to adapt to it.” That is especially true, and remarkably so, for most of us in SEO/SEM.

In-house SEO/SEM teams have much to gain by reaching outside their scope of influence to find additional input that will improve their day-to-day activities. It’s as simple as that.

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and in-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door’s Internet Presence Management (IPM) services. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

The ultimate goal of any in-house search marketer is for search engine marketing to become ingrained in the way a company does business, similar to marketing, advertising, and public relations. It’s rare for search marketing to gain this much visibility, but we are starting to see a few organizations successfully embrace SEO beyond IT and marketing.

When we talk about incorporating search marketing into the way that you do business, we imagine an open flow and exchange of ideas between marketing, IT, and SEO. This article will challenge you to think about how search engine marketing can go beyond IT and marketing and take SEO into new directions.

There aren’t many companies that have successfully taken search marketing beyond IT and marketing, but they’re out there and it is a huge competitive advantage (which is why I’m not giving any examples). They are organizations of all sizes, large, medium, and small. The one thing they have in common is there is someone in-house who champions and evangelizes search engine marketing throughout the entire company, builds alliances, and focuses on how search engine marketing can help other departments’ agendas. Once this happens, the right people catch on to the potential, the flood gates open, and search engine marketing becomes ingrained into the way that a company does business—when they think to bring in PR and Marketing, they also think about search engine marketing.

Here are just a few ways that search engine marketing can go beyond IT and marketing:

• Sales.Search marketing can feed information to the sales department, such as when people actually start looking for your products and services throughout the year, and what search terms are being used by these prospects. Another way to add value to the sales department is via the content that’s needed for successful SEO. Search engine optimization needs keyword-rich, useful content for optimal success. To maximize synergies between functions, consider writing content that will boost rankings and that also can be used by the sales team as conversation starters and resources for prospects.

• Public relations. Search marketing can help boost PR messages by optimizing press releases and bringing PR messages into the SERPs. What isn’t always considered by the PR department is that search marketing can also help defuse negative publicity that can appear in the SERPs, or keep the positive publicity ranking for your brand terms.
• Product management. Keyword research gives product management insight into what people are actively seeking. This information can fuel ideas for new functions for existing products, spawn new product ideas, and drive product naming.
• Brand management. Search marketing can influence brand perception by influencing the sites and web pages that appear for brand searches—those that display the optimal brand messaging. You can also work with brand management to create keyword-rich marketing messages that gives you a need for SEO while offering optimal brand positioning—it’s a message that both SEO and brand management will be proud to include throughout your website.
• Offline media buying/advertising. Search marketing can also give insights into brand research vs. general product research throughout the year, so that you know when people are looking for your company vs. the general product—this information can be incorporated into media planning and scheduling.
• Recruiting. People often search for a brand name and “jobs.” Unfortunately, your recruiting web site may not always rank highest for these types of searches because SEO wasn’t a priority when it was developed. This offers an opportunity for you to work with the recruiting department. If you have openings in a particularly niche and highly specialized field, such as an SEO position or a cognitive engineer role, know that these niche professionals also go to search engines to find where these jobs are posted—if the PPC prices are low, consider using PPC to promote your hard to fill positions using highly targeted search terms.
• Legal. As SEOs, we find tons of “junk” in the SERPs. Big brands find their name on countless spam sites with plagiarized content showing up in the search results. Partnering with the legal department to address these issues has three major benefits, especially if you have an attorney that specializes in cyber law. First, the legal department will be happy to get the reports of abuse so they can address it immediately. Second, the attorney becomes someone you can assign the job of getting the duplicate content out of the SERPs. They will take care of getting the scraper sites out the SERPs for you, shutting down sites due to trademark infringement and/or file DMCA reports to the search engines (leaving you time for everything else). The third and most valuable benefit is that developing a strong relationship with a cyber attorney gives you the chance to make the legal department a strategic ally who may be involved in projects you are not aware of, because the project is going through legal reviews. It takes the right political savviness, but if you can win them over you’ve created an influential ally and a very valuable asset for your in-house search marketing efforts.

Not only can expanding search marketing beyond IT and marketing increase opportunities for your company, it increases the value of the search marketing team, and gets more people in the company talking about search marketing. When more people talk about search, it becomes more visible and appealing, which can make selling your ideas much simpler…particularly as you increase your sphere of influential allies. Just be cautious to not bite off more than you can chew.

Jessica Bowman is the Director of SEO for Business.com and an independent consultant and author of the SEM / SEO In-house Blog. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

In a recent project document floated my way, everyone’s role was listed with many sections explained in extreme detail—programmers were given explicit instructions on expected functionality, designers were shown painstakingly built visual mockups… and the section for search said, “Duane to cover SEO.” Basically, “Oh Shaman of search, work your mystical powers to great effect on traffic and revenues—and do it cheaply, please.”

After years of preaching about how we need to work on projects to include search up front, I find myself wondering if my messages have been heard and understood.

Now, I ask myself this question several times each day—have I explained things in a clear enough manner? It’s far too easy to spin off into my own language of keyword density, canonicalization issues, and keyword research, which is truly voodoo to those “outside.”

As much as I snickered at my past encounter with the idea of “demystifying” what I did as a marketer, I’ve come 180 degrees to understanding, acutely, the need to ensure everyone on the team fully understands the words I say. In some cases, it’s as simple as explaining things a different way. In other cases, it’s as complex as teaching something new, in detail. The bottom line still remains—for a long time into the future, SEO (and parts of PPC) will remain voodoo, regardless of our best efforts to demystify the process.

Now, if we throw in the folks practicing as “black hats,” things can get truly daunting and confusing to those outside the industry. Doorway pages, cloaking, stuffing, burning domains—it’s all in a dark day’s work for an accomplished black hatter.

No wonder so many companies bristle at the thought of building their own in-house search marketing teams—voodoo, black arts, burning domains, bannings, penalties—it’s enough to make your head swim if you’re not already up to your neck in this world.

It remains in the purview of responsible search marketers to explain what they do to clients and co-workers before they do it. It’s tough enough trying to accurately assign an ROI to organic search marketing efforts. Save yourself some grief and be sure to fully explain things to everyone invested in a project well in advance. Helping them understand what “reasonable expectations” are is critical.

If you’re wondering if taking the time to spread the knowledge has any real meaningful impact within a company, take a look at your own daily situations.

Would a project move forward more quickly if the programmers knew how their efforts in building a site or new section might impact search results? Would a product manager be better able to support your efforts to optimize pages if they understood the “voodoo” of search rankings are comprised of hundreds of factors—many of which you can easily influence in a positive way? Would your ecommerce folks help you get resources to rewrite product descriptions to include relevant keywords if they understood how on-page optimization matters? Would your IT architect help you name folders in a certain manner if they understood the incremental differences that naming with keywords vs. anything else might make in the bigger picture?

I’m willing to bet the answer to every scenario above is yes. In every instance, they’d all do what they could to help you get things aligned.

This is why it’s vital to ensure everyone understands a bit about your world. They don’t need to know what to do themselves, necessarily, but they do need to understand that SEO efforts are not some kind of magic spray-paint that gets glossed over a finished product. I’ll teach folks 90% of what I know. The other 10% I keep to myself to keep the mystery just barely alive, and me out in front!

Here are some key phrases and ideas to keep in your back pocket:

• Rankings are NOT metrics
• SEO should be baked in, not spread on top
• SEO is a game of inches, not miles—there’s no ONE thing that will make you a hero
• Usability trumps SEO—the user’s experience should always be the # 1 focus

Duane Forrester is an in-house SEM, sits on the Board of Directors with SEMPO and can be found at his blog where he speaks about online marketing and monetizing websites. Duane is also a writer for the In House column which appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

MarketingSherpa has just released the fourth annual edition of its Search Marketing Benchmark Guide. The Guide is a comprehensive benchmark for all things related to search marketing, including things such as expected search spending for 2008, how search ROI stacks up against other tactics, difficulty in SEM staffing, new ways to evaluate clicks and click fraud, and many other topics.

One interesting aspect of the research this year focused on the challenges to bringing search in-house. If you’re thinking about bringing your search engine marketing in-house, how hard is it? The report features answers from 247 marketers who did just that in the past 24 months, a subset of the 3,053 search marketers who took our August survey.

We asked marketers who stopped outsourcing what successes (or failures) they’ve seen since. The process was more involved than many thought, and they told us how long it took before they were truly up and running, as well as what problems popped up along the way.

We also looked at why it’s so hard to find good search employees and how staffing ranks against other SEM concerns, why these jobs are so mobile, and salary ranges in various parts of the country.

The allure to bring SEM in-house is growing stronger for many marketers, although the number of organizations getting outside help actually increased over the past 12 months. However, it’s becoming more common to use outsourced assistance as part, not all, of the overall SEM effort.

The debate to stop outsourcing your SEM and bring it in-house is a complex one, with pros and cons on both sides.

More than a quarter of marketers we talked to were dissatisfied with their agencies’ performances, while 40% expressed ambiguous feelings. Still, others said they were very happy with their agencies and saw this as a potential waste of time and money. For those who decide to make the move, they’ll find filling SEM-related positions, especially SEO specialists, to be one of the biggest challenges: almost a third of our respondents say it is “very difficult” to attract these employees.

We asked search marketers whose organizations had brought SEM in-house in the past two years about their motivations for doing so. Nearly half thought they would achieve better results from the move. Interestingly, of the 125 organizations in that camp, so many were still ‘in process’ that we were unable to get a good read on their success in optimizing SEM. However, in several post-survey interviews we learned that the reviews were mixed, with a general sense that the decision was a good one but that the move was more involved than expected.

We asked organizations who had made the recent move from outsourcing to in-house SEM to estimate the time it took to implement the change. The median and average aren’t too far apart (three months vs. four months, 11 days), so there’s a good reason to think that the reality is in that range. The fastest moving companies manage to get started within a month, but they’re in the minority and the move for some was to make contractors full-time employees, which is naturally less painful than the alternatives.

We also found that for more than half the organizations we polled, filling SEM-related roles was more difficult than filling other ones in marketing. Of these, SEO specialists were the most challenging, with almost a third of organizations reporting that it was ‘very difficult’ to attract them.

What about training in-house? Someone with media experience might get brought up to speed in between one and three months. Successful agencies have made in-house training a priority. One smart agency president has established a network of stay-at-home moms to do account management—they don’t get stolen by competing agencies and working from home is the most powerful fringe benefit going.

Although the desire to bring SEM in-house is strong, the number of organizations getting help from outside actually increased over the past 12 months. However, it’s becoming more common to use outsourced help as part, not all, of the overall SEM effort. So, while the share of companies using a consultant, agency, or Web design firm for assistance appears to have grown, their role in SEM hasn’t necessarily grown with it.

For those with large SEM budgets, the use of SEM agency assistance is naturally more common than for smaller spenders. The difference is most pronounced in paid search, where more than half of the big spenders use full-service search agencies.

Copies of the 2007 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide are available at the Sherpa Store.

Stefan Tornquist is Research Director of MarketingSherpa Inc.

Education is very important to in-house search engine marketers—it’s the only way you can hope to keep up with the scrappy entrepreneurs who are constantly pushing the envelope with new tactics and techniques. There are many routes that you can go to get your education, but you should understand that in a constantly changing field, education needs to be continual. While you’re learning you’ll be using your new knowledge as part of your daily job. But what else can you do with that education to further the goals of your department?

First, let’s look at the places that you can get your education:

Blogs

The big two here are Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch. Why are they the big two? Well, apart from the fact that they both have many columns addressing various aspects of SEM, and they both keep on top of all search news, both of them put out daily lists of links to other blogs and articles that either say something new and original, or contribute a new perspective to an ongoing blogosphere discussion. So if you just read these two blogs, you’re going to get exposure to a variety of viewpoints, and be kept very well informed on most of what’s happening in search.

Forums

Forums allow you to be involved on a day to day basis in a much more dynamic environment, enabling you to ask and answer questions with other forum participants. Different forums have different styles, focus, and ‘rules of engagement’, so you’ll probably want to lurk for a while to get a feel for a forum, just to make sure that it’s the right place for you to spend your time. Examples to check out here include: The Search Engine Watch Forums, the Cre8asite Forums and the Small Business Brief Forum. While it’s not a true forum, I’m also going to include Sphinn in here, as you do have the ability to create discussion threads, and the comment threads tied to a particular article are sometimes more informative than the original articles.

Conferences

Conferences are a great place to get an in depth education on a variety of SEM topics. The standard bearer for years has been Search Engine Strategies (SES), with PubCon being another option. However, this year has seen the entrance of Search Marketing Expo (SMX). To determine which conference you should attend, you should look at the focus of the conference (some of these conferences are becoming more specialized, focusing on topics such as SMX Local & Mobile and SMX Social Media), the sessions being offered (will they add enough value to cover the cost?), and the location (the conference promoters try their best to spread the conferences throughout the US, and throughout the world. If you’re East coast, then maybe you’ll want to wait the 3 months for the next New York conference, rather than heading out to one on the West coast). Conferences are also a great place to network and meet people that can answer questions that you may have either at that time, or at a later date.

Training Courses

These days more and more vendors seem to be offering training courses on SEM topics. Training ranges from more personal training than you’d receive at a conference session, to specialized training in one or more specific areas of SEM, to tool vendors giving you ‘hands-on’ training on their products. With training courses you need to research the type of training that you are looking for, and look for a best fit based on your needs.

Books

Books? For something that I described as a constantly changing field? Yes, books. There are some good ones out there that can give you a good grounding in overall strategy / tool set use, even if in 6-12 months time they may prove to be outdated. Some examples of books that I’d recommend you read are: “The new Rules of Marketing and PR” by David Meerman Scott, and “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” by Avinash Kaushik. Then there are the e-books that you download that are usually regularly updated by their authors. Examples of SEM ebooks include: Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, and Jennifer Laycock’s Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing.

Networking

In a previous in-house column in Search Engine Land, Duane Forrester did an excellent job discussing how an in-house SEM can build both their internal and external networks, so I’m not going to reprise that here.

So, now that you have all of that education, what are you going to do with it? Well, obviously you’re going to apply it to your job. But here’s another thing that you should do. You should now turn around and become an educator yourself. Take the knowledge that you’ve gained, and spread it around your company. Obviously, other members of your team should be trained up, so that they get the benefit of everything that you’ve picked up that’s pertinent to the job. You should also give upper management overviews of what you’ve learned, and how it’s going to benefit the company when applied. You should take the opportunity to pull in team leaders from other departments, and let them know what you’re doing and why. Let the IT group know why you’re going to be pushing for certain architectural changes on the site. Let corporate communications know why you’re going to recommend particular changes to the press release process flow, etc. If you can get the organization on your side up front, then you’ll have a much easier task the next time the budget is being discussed, or even at corporate task prioritization time.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for a medium sized Virginia company before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. He also organizes the Virginia SEM meetup group. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Marshall Simmonds of the New York Times is, to me, the SEO of the hour right now. For an industry often mischaracterized as doing nothing but blog spamming, Marshall’s work as chief search strategist to institutionalize SEO as part of the regular editorial production at the New York Times lead directly to last week’s news that the paper was opening up its archives without charge, since it already gains so much free search engine traffic that leaving the archives open will mean more traffic and thus higher ad revenues.

So those of you who are cursing those SEOs out of ignorance of what they can do to make quality content more visible? The next time you’re reading something for free at the New York Times, remember it was SEO that made that possible.

Why You Better Learn the PR Side of Search Engines is my Ad Age column this week that ends with some praise for Marshall and what he’s achieved. Marshall Simmonds on the Opening of the NYTimes’ Archived Content and SEO for Major Media Sites from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz is a long interview with Marshall, covering the work he’s done.

One of the biggest realizations that hit many in-house search marketers is the simple fact that they cannot do it all themselves. Despite the best of intentions and the strongest work ethics, the fact remains—you are but one person and there are only so many hours in a day.

If you are fortunate enough to have a dedicated team of search experts working with you, your team can still easily hit a wall. Eventually something will come up, or time and circumstances will conspire to leave you staring at the calendar or out the window with one seemingly frightening through rattling around inside your brain…

You need to hire an agency. GASP!

There is a growing trend today to move search efforts in-house. It may seem like blasphemy to suggest that an in-house SEM or SEM team make room for a dedicated agency relationship, but that agency could provide you with the heavy lifting muscle you need to accomplish menial tasks in a timely manner. They may have access to an expertise you or your team currently lacks, but that your company’s web site needs. It doesn’t matter why you may need to foster an agency relationship, the bottom line is that at some point many of us will face this reality—and with the proliferation of an uncounted number of apparently “professional” shops popping up every day, it takes a very careful vetting process to avoid disappointment.

What do you do?

There’s lot to consider:

• You’ll need to keep things on track while you interview potential agencies
• You’ll need a list of the things that you need the agency to do
• You’ll want to send out requests for proposals (RFPs)
• You’ll want to set up interviews

The list is long and daunting to someone who’s already stretching a 50—60 hour work week to cover the bases as they currently sit.

One item that’s critical to the process, and a step that’s far too often overlooked by many, is that of vetting the potential agency. Looking at their samples and reading their RFPs is important, but to get a real feel for what an agency is like to work with, you need to speak with people. People just like you.

In fact, when the time comes to dig deep on the few who make the cut into the final review process, you’ll want to ask them to provide contact information for the references they supply to you.

Your job is to then track those folks down and set up a meeting to discuss their past work with the agency who listed them as a reference. Be ready with a list of questions and be prepared to follow any leads that might develop.

I went through this process years ago with a company we still outsource to from time to time today. When I need some heavy lifting done or certain tasks managed, we still turn to the company we selected over 3 years ago.

As part of the process I went through in interviewing the companies we were considering, I requested references. Each company happily supplied what they expected were solid references. To this list, I added a couple of my own based on each agency’s published “client list” on their site—just a couple of randomly selected companies.

I took the time to track down the person who ran the agency relationship at each of those companies I had selected and ran them through my “interview” just like the references that had been supplied by the agencies. I was not surprised that one agency ended up with three glowing reviews, plus two total duds (from the companies I’d randomly selected)—after all, if you’re going to send a reference, you’re going to send good ones, right?

Agency two came in with an odd mix of two positives from the supplied reference list and one luke warm one. The two I’d selected on my own were split 50/50.

The third agency in my competition ended up with five basically good reviews, though two warned me to be very clear with them on specific points of what they were to do, what our expectations would be and to keep them on track and on time. I was pleased with this because I felt it reasonable for me to need to be clear on my expectations and to basically be in charge of keeping things on track and on time.

In the end, I was happy enough with the data from the reference checks to make the leap.

One of the critical questions I asked each person I spoke with was, “Would you hire this company to do work for you again?” When I asked this question, I was careful to listen for pauses, or to try to read between the lines in a given response. After all, this person had no idea who I was, and I wanted honest answers, not politically correct, glossed-over niceties.

During your own vetting process, you should settle for nothing less than glowing reviews all around. There are enough solid agencies these days that you can usually find someone in your budget bracket that will do quality work. You may need to wait in line for their services, but better that than moving forward with the wrong agency and blowing the budget on ineffective advice.

Here are a few questions to have handy should you find yourself checking references in the future:

• Did you manage the relationship with the agency for your company? (Critical to ensure you’re speaking with the correct person in a company.)
• Did they deliver on all points you agreed on in the contract?
• Were they easy to get on the phone and timely when responding to e-mails?
• Were their reports easy to understand?
• Is there anything else you can recall about the experience that can help me with my decision on whether to hire them?

Hopefully this will give you a baseline idea on how to check out a company you are thinking of doing business with. Time invested in due diligence is never wasted.

Duane Forrester is an in-house SEM, sits on the Board of Directors with SEMPO and can be found at his blog where he speaks about online marketing and monetizing websites. The In House column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.