From the category archives:

In-House SEO

Sharing Your SEO Knowledge is Good

by Carolyn Shelby on May 21, 2007

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There is a school of thought that the in-house SEO should be like the Wizard of Oz… feared and awed and hiding behind a green velvet curtain where no one is exactly sure what it is he does, but clearly it must be important. I think that, while this might do happy things for one’s ego, it’s not necessarily the best way to go about dealing with the rest of your team/organization.

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: [click to continue...]

Popularity: 30% [?]

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In/Outbound Link Management for the In-House Crowd

by Carolyn Shelby on May 11, 2007

I am pretty much the entire extent of the newly created web services department for an old (~80 years old) , privately held manufacturing company. As I’m hip deep in a complete overhaul of our primary site, I haven’t had the luxury of digging into the seo issues very much, but one of the things I’ve come across recently is the completely laissez faire method of managing inbound links from vendors, showrooms, retailers, and channel partners.

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.) [click to continue...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

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