SEO At the Enterprise Level - Article on Techcrunchit

[Keral_Patel]

Companies fail in three areas:

1. Companies hire the wrong people. They try to save costs by hiring cheaply, but many of these novices struggle to pull off results and may not have managed large projects solo yet. There are also many SEOs who are great at providing recommendations, but lack experience in the challenges involved from recommendation-to-execution. I had two calls this week from companies saying, “We hired someone and our traffic fell.”
2. SEO person isn’t involved throughout the development process. There are many places in the development life cycle where things can go wrong, and SEO needs to be a stakeholder throughout the process to make sure that things go live search engine friendly. One thing I see happening a lot is that a company adds a change for SEO, but that might be later removed by someone who didn’t understand the SEO benefits. At a minimum, SEO should be reviewing the project plan to identify where SEO needs to be involved, wireframes and page designs, and page specifications to give SEO technical requirements to programmers.
3. There’s a human side of SEO. In house experts sometimes struggle to integrate their expertise into the enterprise workflow and secure long-term buy-in from everyone involved in the website. There is also a challenge that, in most companies, SEO sits in marketing–or occasionally in product management and these roles are not typically involved in development at the level that SEO needs to be integrated. Consistently, the companies I work with find the best results when their SEO person sits in the IT department. If you’re in marketing, it can still work, you just have to set up the right touch points with IT to ensure that everything goes live search engine friendly the first time it is launched.


Read More: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/02/05/seo-at-the-enterprise-level-a-major-flop/

What are your thoughts?

 

[~ The 34 Year Buzz!!]

Interesting article, thanks for sharing, and...

...What are your thoughts?

IMO, SEO is over-rated and people should understand the leading experts disagree on many issues.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Note: The link is to an article which is ~2 two years old, and helps to show the leading SEO experts disagree on many issues.

 

[Keral_Patel]

The link is to an article which is ~2 two years old, and helps to show the leading SEO experts disagree on many issues.

Yes they all might have different styles of doing it. If they all can achieve results with their style then its great. Only thing is the companies that are hiring the SEO's are looking for a great deal. Also those companies are thinking its a one time deal. Get it done and forget the guy.

Its becoming very common now as most of the brandnames are ranked far far away from where they should have been ranking. Maybe because they have lots of problems with understanding.

1) They want a guy who can do the SEO and also talk smooth.
2) They want a guy who can do the paperwork in better way then he can do the SEO.
3) They want it to be a one time deal.

Most of the companies now have understood this but still there are some which haven't. The one that have understood it might have learnt some lessons from the past.

 

[enlytend]

3) They want it to be a one time deal.

It's never a one-time deal - THAT's a problem right there.

Re the article on ranking factors - Until the search engines reveal their entire algorithm to the masses (yeah, right!) nobody can do anything but guess at that. There's disagreement on nit-picky little things, but the "big picture" concepts are the same.

The ability to work well with cross-functional teams is a big issue in a corporate setting. There are always "political issues" and an accompanying variety of personalities and agendas to deal with - being able to do that successfully can mean the difference between success and failure for any project.

Anyone hiring personel for a job which requires interaction with other work groups who doesn't take that into account is a fool!

At the same time, the SEO hiree needs to appreciate that corporate higher ups LIVE by reports and numbers and should be prepared to provide them ad-nauseum if they accept the job.