Let me start with the bottom line (making it the top line!): Your IT guy is not an SEO guy or a web guy. He’s an IT guy. So get him away from your website projects.

Having consulted with a number of companies that rely on their IT guy to lead the way with their Internet presence, I’ve come to realize that in the vast majority of cases, they should be kept far away from a small businesses’ website and Internet marketing.

The Problem

The problem is that the vast majority of IT guys are not web guys or SEO guys. So this is my warning to all of the businesses out there that rely on their IT person to make their web marketing decisions for them (having a website IS web marketing by default) – are you sure you should be putting your company’s reputation on the line for someone who sets up servers, fixes your computer, helps you with your email, and handles related matters?

My Doctor Analogy

An IT guy is not an SEO or a web guy, he’s an IT guy. These are completely different specialties the same way that asking an eye doctor to check your teeth doesn’t really make sense. They are similar professions in that they both work on the human body but they have different focal areas. Your eye doctor can recommend a good dentist and vice versa but that’s about it. You’re IT could recommend and help you choose an SEO company or a web guy but it ends there. IT people are not trained to be web designers or Internet marketers. The ones that try to do it all typically lack the integrity to tell you that they are not qualified to do the job, or they recognize that you’re small company and don’t have the website investment funds to hire someone else (a huge mistake in my opinion).

What is IT?

In the broadest sense of the term, IT refers to information technology which encompasses anything related to computers and websites. In a practical sense, IT guys are the people that companies rely on for server installation, network administration, computer software and hardware issues, backup and storage solutions, and related matters. When companies are looking to hire IT guys they may expect them to be well versed in web promotion but that’s a mistake.

What is a Web Guy?

Generally speaking, a web design company designs, builds, and programs a website.

What is an SEO Guy?

Someone who promotes your website, especially through the search engines, and looks at the short and long-term options to generate target market leads through the site and overall Internet presence.

How to Mix IT, SEO and Web Design

The best case scenario is to have a great web designer who is also an experienced SEO with a track record of success. This is a rare combination. If your company already has an IT guy, you may want to let him find an SEO company for you. Chances are your website needs a re-design so don’t hire an SEO company that doesn’t produce persuasive web design work.

Do not hire a web design company and then try to sprinkle on SEO when you are about to launch the site. SEO does not work that way.  The best case scenario is to hire an SEO web designer and let them help you strategize your way to online profit.

You must consider the variations in spelling across countries. For example, I’m Canadian and in Canada, Australia and the UK, we tend to add the letter “u” to many words such as behaviour, labour, and neighbour. Americans also spell “travelers” without a double “l” (travellers). Even the word “optimization” is spelled “optimisation” in some countries. There are many examples of these subtle variations.

While the larger search engines have figured out that “behavior” and “behaviour” mean the same thing, there is something to be said about these variations.

A Business Decision

From an Internet marketing standpoint, deciding between the two spellings can be a difficult business decision. For example, if I’m based in Canada but my target market is in the United States, which of the following should my website indicate?

“My company performs Internet usage and behavioral trends analyses”
(for US audiences)

or

“My company performs Internet usage and behavioural trends analyses”
(for Canadian audiences)

You may want to consider writing in the language of your target market. In this case it would be the US if I intended to push my SEO services on American companies versus Canadian ones.

The Cultural Factor

One must consider the intersection of culture and language with their website and cross-border marketing approach. If I add that extra “u” it is likely to look like a typo to Americans (or at least they may scratch their heads and wonder if it was spelled correctly).

However, Canadian culture is such that we already know that our largest trading partner is the US and we’re used to seeing American versions of text. So if my website uses American spelling variations, it is less likely that Canadians will see the lack of a “u” as an issue. Canadians are more likely to take it in stride and accept it as is.

Competitive Terms

If you’re company is going after a very competitive keyword term, you might want to consider the regional variations in spelling. Domain names with slight differences may result in differential ranking. If you are going after a very competitive keyword term that is regionalized, you may want to consider targeting that location with the most common variation of the word’s spelling in the URL that local people expect to see.

How to Test the Idea

Simply perform some searches in Google and you’ll notice the variations in rankings. Look at any potential competitors’ websites that already have high rankings and see what they’ve done.

Note that just because a competitor has done something to their website, it does not necessarily mean it will work for you. Just use it as a guideline. Always check to see what other websites in your industry are doing. As the Internet continues to get flooded with websites, you will have more and more sites to review and use as a basis for your own decisions.

• A major radio station was looking for a company that specializes in job placement to be featured on a one-hour show in a  mid-afternoon hotspot. They simply searched for a job placement agency and my client was the first listing. Their company name was announced a dozen times over the hour. Web analytics showed that more people visited their website during that time.
• I published a press release for a client on a hot topic which was picked up by several media publications including a follow-up interview by a major newspaper in Sydney Australia. This lead to more links pointing into the client’s website thanks to the added publicity.
• One of my clients is a chef with a #1 ranking. He was asked to join a TV show thanks to his website which the producers found in a Google search.
• Several magazines and newspapers were looking to interview specialists in a variety of industries related to my clients. I had optimized their websites and their high rankings and persuasive websites lead to them getting featured. (This list includes me! I’ve been quoted multiple times in major newspapers thanks to my high rankings and expertise).

Note the my focus is mainly on website optimization. Surely getting involved in active social communities like Twitter can yield success as well.

Here are 10 signs that the SEO you hired is doing amateur work on your business’s website:

1. There’s a ”Google PageRank Checker” banner with a number next to it on any and all pages of the site.
2. There’s a link on the homepage that says “as listed in ABCXYZ directory”
3. The main keyword terms on every page are repeated to the nth degree and are in bolded font.
4. Your SEO guy doesn’t know the nitty gritty basics of a website, like how to build one! I’m sorry but if your SEO person doesn’t know  HTML, CSS, and some other important aspects of web page construction, you should probably stay away from them.
5. Your SEO claims he’ll submit to your website to the search engines.
6. Your SEO has found a “creative” way to hide keywords throughout the site. Methods generally thought to be unacceptable by search engines yet popular among amateurs include hiding keywords in white text on a white background, text hidden in <div> tags, among others. Similar amateur mistakes include hiding text far below the main area of the page (so when you scroll down far below the main content, you find a bunch of keywords and links, and so on.
7. You have a splash page with a Flash intro. Even though the search engines are getting better at reading some basic Flash, it’s wrong for oh-so-many reasons! (Ask an expert to explain why to you…)
8. Your ugly, dated, tired-looking website is not a problem to your SEO person. He hasn’t pointed out that a bad design is bad for business (in most cases). So, he tries to optimize your current site without a re-design, and worse, doesn’t add a call to action!
9. Your SEO only discusses being on the first page of Google and how high rankings are the be all and end all. This is one of the most common mistakes among SEOs in general. A high ranking on its own means increased visibility. What about the pursasive nature of the website? Has your SEO discussed web analytics, conversions, or long-term goals? Website visitors do not automatically become conversions (sales, newsletter sign-ups, etc). If your SEO hasn’t discussed this with you, you’ve hired an amateur.
10. Your SEO claims you need major updates every month but can’t tell you what they are.

I honestly don’t know why but there are a handful of items that continue to be mentioned in my discussions with small business owners. The most popular include:

• “It’s the keywords, right, it’s all about sticking words all over,  just repeat them over and over, right?” (Wrong.)
• “Let’s put white text on a white background so we can hide the important words there” (No.)
• “The trick is how often the link in the search engine results page is clicked, right?”  (They are always surprised to learn that clicking your own link many times won’t count many times over.)
• “Pay per click is tied to SEO, right? If I spend more money they give me a boost right?” (Wrong.)

These are SEO myths and misunderstandings. Who is telling people this!??!! The truth is that there are over a hundred factors involved in search engine optimization.

Attention Business Owners!

Perhaps it’s my competitors, who don’t really understand SEO who are telling people this. I really don’t know. If you’re a business owner, please add your comments as to how you first heard about SEO and the few techniques you actually know about. I’m willing to bet that there are more than a few people out there who would be interested.

Take for instance some of the general factors that must be considered in an SEO training program.

• The SEO as an art vs SEO as a science debate
• Trying to fit SEO into a comprehensive marketing plan
• The on-site SEO vs all-linking debate
• White-hat SEO vs Grey-hat SEO vs Black-hat SEO
• Internet marketing vs SEO

Relatively few industry insiders can explain the various perspectives within each of the above, much less impart that knowledge onto others in an SEO workshop training seminar.

Hiring Tips
Here are some tips on how to find the best SEO teachers. Admittedly, some may be more difficult to assess in an initial conversation. That’s just the nature of how life goes when hiring any company. Consider that when you go to Best Buy, if you haven’t read the online reviews about a particular digital camera, you’re left to trust a twenty-something year old guy who was told what to answer you, typically exaggerates and uses a bit of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) to make the sale, while knowing very little about the product.

That said, here are some of the most important aspects of the best corporate SEO trainers:

Experience: There is No Substitute for it

Your SEO trainer should ideally have at least 3-5 years of hands-on experience in SEO. I will elaborate on this point in a future blog post but for now suffice it to say that there is a history to the SEO industry. The fact of having used SEO during the “early days” and making changes over the years, as needed and as Google (in particular) changed, is much more powerful than someone who “heard” about the old ways without any real understanding of them and their progress.

There is no substitute for experience and it’s not something you can rapidly acquire when it comes to SEO. As people gain more experience, they have a larger database of examples from which to draw. You’d be amazed at how much that can help during the learning experience. This is especially true for the world of in-house SEO training where there exists even fewer teachers than small business SEO trainers. (To be fair, many large scale companies are still ignorant as to the power of SEO and haven’t reached out to SEOs who could help their businesses).

Continuing Education: Up-to-date with the Most Recent Trends

The fact that I still see companies who offer search engine submission and extensive link exchange packages is unnerving. You want to know that your SEO trainer is reading up on the newest areas of growth within the industry, learning about statistical packages, and other happenings. In the real professional world, psychologists, medical doctors, and countless other accredited associations require their constituents to acquire continuing education credits every once in a while. The idea is to make sure they are keeping up to date with the latest techniques. Well, in the SEO world there is no such program. You have to be a very self-motivated go-getter to spend a lot of time reading and testing to keep up with the latest changes.

That said, I suggest that you look for someone who does refresh their knowledge periodically, especially those who adapt the services they offer. For example, if social media optimization is becoming important for SEO, does the trainer dicuss it and integrate it into the training program? The ability to integrate and account for change is important.

Demonstrated Flexibility

The best SEO trainers will coach you through the different points of view and explain why some methods may be better than others. SEO is not a one-size fits all type of program. I highly recommend against hiring an SEO consultant with a totalitarian attitude whereby they only give you the one perspective and it happens to be the one they want to push, while completely ignoring all others.

Tested Techniques

They have tested various techniques and been proven effective (this ties into the point about experience).

Real-life Understanding

Try to discover whether the SEO trainer is grounded in reality. I know that sounds like an unusual criterion but if you consider that someone will be forced to generate ideas on the fly to account for your specific needs, it is helpful if they know what they are talking about.

Needs-based Understanding

Training individuals and small business web developers is different from training larger corporate web teams. Ask whether the person understands that corporate culture is typically slow to change and may therefore require increased flexibility within the training? For example, anyone could set up a training program but when working with a brand name company, telling them that changing <title> tags is important doesn’t mean that they will make the change within 2 days of the seminar ending. It could take weeks or months for such a change to be approved.

Real-world Teaching Experience & Ability

SEO is very much its own bubble. Ideally you would find someone who was teaching (any subject) before becoming an SEO trainer. If you can hire someone with years of experience as a successful educator, more power to you. If they’ve taken courses in teaching, even better! Keep in mind that just because someone is great at doing something doesn’t mean they will be great teachers.

Goals

Find out what the SEO trainer views as goals for your company. Is it high rankings? Increasing visibility? Sales lead generation? A shift toward pay per click? If they only talk about rankings, you will lose out.

Integrity

I’ve been asked to optimize some very unusual websites, sometimes under conditions that don’t sit well with me. I would rather work with a company that has integrity, like I do. Wouldn’t you?

Actual Design Experience

Consider it a major bonus if you can find an SEO trainer who actually knows what an attractive design is. You’d be hard pressed to find one with extensive web design experience. I am actually astounded that so many SEOs don’t know the first thing about web design and have never used Dreamweaver or Photoshop. There is something to be said for hiring an SEO trainer who has design experience.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an SEO trainer and can be hired to work with you and your company. This blog post was written based on my experience in working with many people at a multitude of companies. I encourage you to add your own comments on the topic. Did I miss some points? Do you disagree with others?

As a business owner looking to get more leads and generate more sales through your website, you may have a difficult time with optimization if you

(1) Believe that SEO will bring instant results.

Search engine optimization takes time. Making a significant jump in search engine rankings frequently takes anywhere from three to six months. If you are launching a website for the first time, it could take a year, especially in highly competitive markets. Unfortunately, many business owners expect results to come in much quicker than that and often blame the optimization company for failing to achieve the goals they expected in a short period of time.

(2) Hire a company that guarantees top 10 results.

I teach business owners this hard to swallow reality of SEO every single day. No one can guarantee top 10 results. Honest SEO consultants will tell you this up front. Even the search engine companies say that it is impossible for anyone to guarantee top 10 placements. Yet still many insist on a guarantee which is not feasibly possible. You should be weary of companies who offer these types of guarantees. If you need to be on top within the next five minutes, use pay per click (PPC) services.

(3) Use SEO as the only means of generating leads.

Search engine optimization is a very powerful sales and lead-generating tool. Investing in SEO should be one of multiple channels for many businesses. Many brick and mortar businesses that rely only on an optimized website may be setting themselves up for problems when their rankings drop or their competitors get ahead. An experienced Internet strategist will be able to offer several means of potential target market traffic and Internet marketing advice.

(4) Expect top results based on your web design quote with a vague “SEO included” as a minor point in a proposal.

There are web design companies who offer a “bit of SEO” and there are SEO companies that offer web design. I would typically place more trust in the latter if my goal was to generate leads. Every single day business owners just like you hire web design companies that “add some SEO” to the proposal as an add-on rather than an important feature of the project. If your web design company failed to consult with you regarding the optimization process and sent you a proposal that doesn’t have a significant section about SEO, don’t have high expectations for your website’s lead generating ability. That’s obviously not to say that it won’t generate qualified leads. It might but you probably aren’t getting the best out of your site.

(5) Hire a company that doesn’t keep up with changes.

During preliminary discussions, many companies continue to ask me to include “submit website to search engines” in the proposal. They are always shocked to learn that the technique went out in the 1990s. These days, SEO involves the basics of on-site work and link building but there are also press releases, social media networking, viral content for link baiting, and so on. Ask your current SEO company to explain those to you!

(6) Rely on SEO software.

SEO software cannot replace a professional SEO specialist. In rare cases software may be helpful but it won’t get most companies very far. There are simply too many factors to consider and each website should be handled with respect to its own history and goals. Each website must be optimized and marketed using a customized process. What works for one website may not work for another.

(7) Have unrealistic expectations.

As stated earlier, there is a common misconception among many business owners that all you have to do is “add some SEO” and you’re all set. It simply doesn’t work that way. Moreover, just because your website is at the top it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will instantly generate countless sales. It is true that being at the top gives you the potential to get significantly more leads than you otherwise would (e.g., as compared to being on the 9th page), but you have to be realistic. Having an optimized website may not bring your business instant riches, but it can help substantially toward increasingly the bottom line when implemented properly. Think of the logical opposite of not being found which is that you won’t make any sales, produce any leads, or be able to service existing customers.

Additionally, don’t insist that one word (e.g., “cars”) should be your top keyword term. Not only will your website not rank in the top 10 for that term, it completely misses the point of optimization. In many cases, you want to target your local niche market who can purchase your products and services and are able and willing to do so. If you are selling cars locally, don’t target people outside of your selling area.

(8) Confuse SEO with PPC (pay per click).

SEO and PPC are two separate means to an end. They are both methods used to generate target market traffic to a website. It is generally believed that SEO can yield a better return on your investment although it is more difficult to measure. On the other hand, PPC is highly measurable but in some highly competitive markets has become so expensive that many businesses have been out-priced and simply cannot afford it any longer (or to even start up).

(9) Believe that SEO is easy.

Anyone can learn the basics of SEO which is probably why so many business owners and some webmasters continue to believe that SEO is easy. The truth is it’s not. There are so many factors to consider that hiring a company with experience is your best bet in achieving great results.

In a rough analogy, think of optimizing your website in terms of bringing your car in to be fixed. You understand that the engine is broken and a few more pertinent details such as having a broken pipe or valve but be honest, do most people understand (or even care to understand) the details of it? You brought the car to a specialist and expect them to know what to do. Few would consider fixing your car as simple enough for anyone to do. The same is true for optimization. You search for a company that you believe to be reputable and let them take care of the details, of which there are many. While it is true that there is no standardized certification program for SEO as there may be with auto mechanics, it is up to you to find the company you believe to be reputable.

(10) Ignore the bigger picture.

SEO and Internet marketing approaches are not just about getting people to your site. If visitors don’t feel that your business is credible, they will quickly move on to your competitors’ sites. When web surfers land on your site, you have seconds to show them what they want or they will be lost. Unfortunately, business owners (and some SEO companies) restrict their thinking to a high ranking for their main keyword term. They don’t care about anything else but getting to the top for “Miami Used Cars,” for example. Ugly and amateur websites will not convert website visitors as well as they could otherwise perform. It is understood that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but let’s get real here. A website that looks like your high school sophomore nephew put it together last Sunday probably lacks the content, usability, calls to action and other factors considered to be of importance for making the sale. In a world where users are looking for easy access to specific content, that poorly developed, time-consuming flash intro just won’t cut it. Stick with the professionals – they can save you a lot of headaches.

*Note: I originally wrote this post as an article that was published in July 2007 for an Internet marketing magazine which has since ceased operations. It’s remarkable how after a year and a half it’s still relevant.