How to SEO within a company? Do companies need an SEO Team? ·

I understand how important an SEO project is but in order to truly harness its power the solution must incorporate a proactive plan to see how sites may be negatively or positively impacted. I believe many of the recommendations make sense across the SEO community but have yet to see how implementation is possible within a company. Many companies are not really sure what SEO solves until they search for something pertaining their site and then the realization befalls upon them. In order to solve this problem I’ve formulated some easy steps for a company to properly perform SEO. The first step is to have a group or committee in place within the company to ensure success and to measure that success. The last thing anyone wants to see (hopefully) is something negative happen to their site and feel most companies usually have a strong internal team possible to make decisions from a technological, marketing and user-experience.

Companies need an SEO team to measure results.

The SEO group that would be created would make sure that they are evolving, checking and responsibly handling SEO to make sure their site does not drop off the face of Google but instead bubbles up to the top of many search results across a variety of engines. The goal is simple -be number 2-3 across all search results whether it be MSN, Yahoo, Google or Ask. The group would be tasked with using their talents (noted below) to figure out how to best implement changes and meet to report their findings. Meetings should be held on Wednesdays to discuss methodologies for implementation, code practices, snapshots, competitor analysis, Omniture results vs. on page results, linkage, monitor content and provide best practice analysis across a variety of areas. Group meetings would include a variety of members from the company to include a designer, developer, marketing person, manager and possibly 2-3 other people in order to have a probable and real measure of related results. This group would vote on what they feel are the best keywords. These people would act as the ‘consensus’ of what users may search for to find the site using natural keywords on their site. Once the committee is built and a test area has been chosen the desired result can be replicated using an accurate method. This is then repeated across other areas, and possibly even to other sites. Once there is an accurate measure you can then use this for promotion via press releases, help sales with updated metrics and to increase your own marketing efforts internally without having to add extra resources increasing the ROI for the venture.

SEO Internal Committee

The group’s initial responsibility would be to have a ‘consensus’ for best implementation methods via title-keywords-descriptions in one arena preferably based on documentation provided by some type of analytics whether it be Google, Omniture, etc. This team would measure current and future results using screenshot or snapshots from a variety of engines, research competitors to see what keyword are used, determine the type of content required for increased visibility along with link-backs competitors have, test optimization algorithms by checking if changing the order of particular keywords or reduction of keywords increases search engine optimization, use some type of Omniture or other reporting in order to use real data for implementation for keywords, check what can be done regarding code practices for H1, H2 and H3 tags for SEO, and finally content optimization making sure that you reach the desired 8% goal for keywords within the content. This will inevitably increase viewership and allow your company to truly measure where you may be lacking regarding content from the user perspective but will also allow your company to be proactive with change by adding key members of technology into the committee. If you build a team that’s diverse enough you would be able to tackle many areas not just from a technology standpoint, but for a real-time and real-user position rather than scramble to figure out how to fix something if a result is undesirable or how to repeat the result in other areas. There may be a variety of ways to go about this but here’s my suggestion:

The Internal SEO Group involvement would include:

1. Tackle One Area for preliminary testing, my suggestion is called “Formula 1” –This is a Page No One Visits, this way you will have the Formula for the proper SEO balance without risk to the site
2. Take snapshots of all page locations across all engines –
3. Document position within search engine along with title and keywords
4. Document linking across sites and engines
5. Check natural keywords for site traffic using Omniture reports vs what is currently on the page regarding keywords
6. R&D – Continuously check data per key pages for optimization every week – see if site is negatively or positively affected
7. Documentation of above heuristics
8. Use research for other site areas, continuously testing and reporting on Wednesdays.
9. Plan on how to drive pre-during-post analytics to user consumption.
10. Test new marketing strategies based on implementation practices possibly targeting specific browsers and engines

SEO is not a one-man-show.

The committee should sit down to discuss how to facilitate the best proven methodology along with documentation within their organization. Mostly everything that happens on a site should be proactive with key team members. Just as Google changes their algorithm and has a team to do just that websites need to have the same put into practice. I feel a plan needs to evolve in order to get users where your content is supposed to lead them to as a team and as search engines change their mechanisms.

Suggestions? Send em in. And as always I look forward to empowering our site even if it is one page at a time.

— Zeus Blog

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