Tag: in-house

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Bon Jovi SEO: They Give Search a Bad Name

Spam on my site and you’re to blame,
Darlin’, you give search a bad name!
I paid your bill now my sales are in pain,
Darlin’, you give search a bad name!

Excerpts from my latest article on Practical eCommerce, “SEO Professionals Can Harm an Ecommerce Business.”

Like Bon Jovi’s song, “You Give Love a Bad Name,” some search engine optimization companies give that profession a bad reputation. Practical eCommerce recently fielded a question from a reader wondering why his site was being penalized for work his SEO company had done on his behalf. It doesn’t seem fair, he complained. He’s right, it doesn’t seem fair when you’ve trusted a company to improve your site’s organic search performance and instead the company makes it worse. Shouldn’t the SEO company be punished instead of the hapless site owner? It just doesn’t work that way, whether it seems fair or not.

Anyone can call himself or herself an SEO professional, just like anyone can call himself or herself a web designer, a landscaper, a chef or any number of other professions. Skill and knowledge levels vary greatly in any industry, as does the professionals’ interest in providing a fair service for a fair price.

Is the company ethical, does it strive to provide the best service possible for every client, or is it just out to make a quick buck? For ecommerce merchants looking to retain an SEO professional, here’s how to tell the difference: SEO Professionals Can Harm an Ecommerce Business.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Priorities on Ice? Open the SEO Icebox.

I’m a gal of action. If something needs to be done, now’s a great time to do it. So I’m finding one of the hardest parts of in-house SEO for me is the icebox. While I try to chill out, I’ve got to remind myself what I would have told my clients in this situation: Stop focusing on what you can’t do and start doing what you can.

Our development team has different priority levels for projects: active, backlog and icebox. We might all agree that a project is a critical priority for SEO, but when pitted against resource conflicts like server uptime and affiliate widget development not even I can argue that my SEO project is more critical to the bottom line. So while I’m cooling my heels in the icebox waiting for the resources to get my technical SEO roadblocks removed, I’m turning to my own SEO icebox.

Most tasks in my icebox have kept perfectly well. Some of them are even interesting! A competitive analysis on a key rival. An analysis of the URLs driving keyword traffic, and whether they’re the URLs most likely to convert. Research into relevant directories & wikis to submit to. Stockpiling content to flow into the pages that will exist when dev thaws out my SEO project. And many others.

Yes, some things expired too quickly or grew a thick layer of freezer fur. For instance, it’s a bit late to whip up a Father’s Day landing page. But if it had been a higher priority, it wouldn’t have been in my icebox in the first place. So no harm done.

So that’s my mantra this week: Stop focusing on what you can’t do and start doing what you can. It may not be the huge leap forward I want, but I’ll be better positioned to leap farther faster.

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.