Some of the bad things about being the Man Behind the Curtain include:

• Co-workers thinking you’re a pretentious ass who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
• Superiors thinking you’re a pretentious ass who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
• People (especially I.T.) deciding you’re a pretentious ass to whom they don’t want to talk, so they just exclude you from important decisions like making changes to the web server configuration, or changing hosting providers, or worse…. making “fixes” to the website.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a time to throw down and flex your “I know what I’m talking about and you don’t so shut up and do what I say” muscles, but all the fricking time isn’t the way to do it. Personally, I try to be Polly Anna Sunshine around the office as much as possible, and when I do flip the bitch-switch, it’s (a) for a really good reason and (b) is WAY more scary to the unfortunate target because it is such a drastic departure from my usual tone of voice and body language. (Maybe I shall share some of my more entertaining arguments with our consultants on the blog sometime…)

Anyway, some of the wonderful advantages and plusses to sharing your wealth of SEO knowledge with your team are:

• Education increases understanding and that increases willingness to actively participate in new projects and initiatives. Help them comprehend the value and the methods and they’ll help you by buying-in sooner and being more effective when they participate because they understand the goals and they value the results of a good job.
• General, regular education provides a framework for comprehension (so their eyes don’t glaze over and immediately tune you out when start blathering about online marketing and SEO… meetings are SO much more productive when people are actually paying attention).
• Taking the time to educate your team gives you an opportunity to control what they learn and how they interpret the newfound knowledge. Ever hear the saying “If they don’t learn it at home, they’ll just learn it on the street”? Same holds true here. Make sure they’re learning concepts correctly and ways to implement them that aren’t going to get your company deindexed or something equally bad. It’s the best way to prevent someone from learning just enough to be dangerous and then deciding they’re going to “help”.

Ultimately, it isn’t going to hurt your job security to teach interested co-workers how to read the charts and reports you’re generating and to understand some general SEO and online marketing concepts. Teach them the difference between ppc and organic. Explain why online reputation management is important. Help them understand so they want to help you.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
Sharing Your SEO Knowledge is Good

I’m sure I don’t have to regurgitate the value of good anchor text and the value of inbound links, so I won’t :) I’m also sure you’ll understand why I was so squicked when I saw some sites linking to our corporate site instead of our primary site (the corporate site really isn’t what we want to have the highest visiblity), some sites are using really weird words and phrases for anchor text, some places are using images with no alt text, etc. Everything is just completely inconsistent and very little of it is beneficial.

I’ve also had a couple reciprocal link requests come across my desk, and one or two, “Hey, we’re one of your vendors and we’d like to add a link to your site on our website… for $1000 a year.” (Um, yeah.)

At first, I just kept explaining the way things ought to be dealt with and why to people, but I found I was repeating myself so much that it was ultimately going to be easier to just write up a new policy about how these issues are to be addressed. I know “policy statements” and guidelines just reek of corporate politics, the fact is, I *am* in a big corporate environment and people only adhere to guidelines that are in writing and are official company policy. I can’t expect them to completely wrap their brains around the import of these policies, but once they make it to “official policy” status, I can expect them abide by them because they are officially official.

Here are the items I addressed in my policy (obviously, you’ll want to tailor your policies to match your specific situation and write it according to your own company’s specs), but I’m hoping this provides some food for thought and good starting point for crafting your own document.

1. Outbound Link Requests
   1. Who handles these requests and instructions for routing to the proper parties
   2. General policies regarding outbound links (in case anyone is wondering)
2. Inbound Links
   1. General policies, including will we pay for links? If so, under what circumstances? If not, why? Etc. (People are more likely to abide by the policy if they have at least some understanding of the rationale behind the edict.)
   2. Preferred anchor text, correct destination URI, code examples.
   3. Who handles these requests and instructions for routing to the proper parties
3. Mail and Phone Solicitations for Online Directories, etc.
   1. Designate one person/team to handle these requests/calls, so that there are no surprises like “What do you mean we’ve been buying links on pr0n sites?”

Ultimately, the goal here is to establish guidelines that are understandable and easy to follow for the unwashed masses at your company, and you want to train them to funnel these types of issues to you so you (or whomever is primarily responsible for SEO) not only know exactly what’s going on as much as possible, but so that you also have a means of enforcing your policies and ensuring compliance throughout your organization.

Start a binder or a little section on your intranet for your SEO policies. Teach your team why this stuff is important to the overall effort, and put some effort into getting their buy in. Writing policies and guidelines are busywork/p.i.t.a. type of jobs, but the long term rewards are worth it.

This post is courtesy of CSHEL Chicago SEO
In/Outbound Link Management for the In-House Crowd