Yet the traffic we got from it was not solely parasitic referrals from SEL, but also lots of direct hits and referrals from elsewhere. It seems as though it tapped into some tiny, niche zeitgeist, resulting in lots of people in the industry sending it to their friends and acquaintances. Accidental linkbait! Read on for more details.

As it turns out, quite a few in-house SEOs got a great, vicarious or direct thrill from it. Just as I mentioned, lots of the internal search optimization specialists do not have the leeway to write about what they do, and a number of companies want even the existence of their in-housers to be kept hush-hush. Also, a significant number of SEO industry articles in the past have focused on some bashing of companies’ decisions to insource this sort of work, trying to fearmonger companies into using their services. This leaves a lot of in-house SEOs feeling neglected, misunderstood, or even frustrated at the lack of representative voice in the blogosphere. So, the article apparently gave in-housers some uncharacteristic public exposure and a bit of vindicating reinforcement for the hard work they do, day-in and day-out.

The aftermath of the article has been entertaining all around! I got quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that most or all of the SEOs I listed were almost immediately courted by independent SEO firms, and company staffing representatives. I was also approached by a number of these headhunters! I suspect that this feeding frenzy ensued because of the increasing number of SEO jobs throughout the country, coupled with the dearth of experienced, high-quality candidates. (See Monster.com’s hundreds of SEO jobs listed — many of which have remained unfilled for some lengths of time.)

I noted the list could have a degree of error involved — indeed, some folx pointed out that I’d accidentally listed a few folx who shouldn’t be considered “in-house” at all – the FindLaw folx, for instance. It probably would’ve been preferable for me to’ve contacted each individual before publishing the list, just to verify accuracy — but the research to compose the list was already time-consuming, and it would’ve taken quite a bit more work to’ve contacted each person to obtain their feedback.

WebMama cracked me up completely by mentioning “out-house” SEOs when she spoke of one of the in-housers, Tanya Vaughan, with whom she’s worked. I assumed this mention of “out-house” was intentionally self-deprecating humor!

I was deluged by requests from professionals who wished to be added to the list — so much so that I had to declare the directory to be frozen for the time being. As one pro laughingly pointed out, I made the grand mistake of inviting SEOs to request links from me!

I was taken to task a bit for my arbitrary methodology in deciding who should be added to the list. This was my bad for not being clear in how I chose those listed, and if I do issue another, more-comprehensive list in the future, I’ll try to clearly communicate the selection criteria. My only excuse is that I’m not a professional journalist, and I didn’t expect the article and list to get the amount of attention they got.

Dave Pasternack, a principal of Did-It SEM firm, has sparked controversy in the recent past by suggesting that companies didn’t need SEO consulting at all. Dave also posted a comment on my blog list, asking how many of the companies had decided to in-source after using external SEO firms. Dave, I don’t have specifics, but I’d be willing to bet that most in-housers likely contract out some special research questions, projects, or competitive reporting duties to external firms.

See, my take on the whole in-house vs. outsourced SEO work is that the two camps are actually pretty symbiotic. I know that some companies like Amazon.com, Yahoo, and MSN have fairly large departments focussing on both SEO and SEM. But, many other firms have only a few managers dedicated to search marketing tasks, so these folx will typically contract out portions of their project work to external firms. Also, internal SEOs sometimes hire SEO firms to train themselves and their staff, and they depend on the SEO firms for advice and information gleaned through blogs and conference sessions. Neither camp should look upon the other as a threat.

Also, most companies have found some value in a mixture of paid and natural search marketing, so I believe it’s also an overreaction for paid search ad management companies to feel any need to deride SEO or go on the offensive in trying to push companies away from SEO contracting. Most in-house SEOs are not interested so much in the philosophical controversy between paid/natural, but are looking for ways to manage a comprehensive program that has good ROI.

A number of in-house SEOs wrote to me to mention that they don’t feel secure in blogging about Search Marketing stuff, because it’s either against their corporate rules or because they fear that their company would potentially interpret their writing as revealing proprietary or competitive information about their work.

I have some advice for those of you In-House SEOs who feel insecure in blogging:

• Naturally, don’t publicly disclose elements of your work that are proprietary or which would give your competition too much info. Beyond that, you should be able to talk about stuff that is commonly-known or stuff that any SEO would be able to tell after looking at your site for five minutes. There’s no real risk of disclosing proprietary stuff if you’re talking about things that are moderately well known to the industry.
• Carefully read your organization’s employee rules and be sure that you adhere to those completely. Many companies allow employees some latitude in what they do outside of work, so read carefully to see if the rules allow you this freedom.
• If your company rules are so ultra-restrictive about engaging in public discourse, you might be able to campaign to have the rules changed or perhaps you could get permission anyway. I’ve found that blogging allows me to trade research with others in the industry, so being allowed to do some amount of blogging can be beneficial to your work for the company.
• Some in-house folx anonymously blog. This is one way to engage with the blogosphere without having uber-conservative companies come down on you like a load of bricks. To do this, maybe write under an alias, and set up your blog and articles with no mentions of your company nor yourself. If you’re building a blog off a custom domain name, be sure to register the domain using one of those services which will keep your identity secret, otherwise someone will look up your name and potentially expose you.
• Be aware of SEC rules and guidelines if your company is publicly-traded. You do not want to get into trouble for unintentionally influencing stock prices, so avoid making forward-sounding statements about your company’s work and plans.

Ultimately, exercise careful consideration — you should evaluate whether your company is flexible enough to allow you to blog or not, and you have to make the decision for yourself.

While these ideolized impressions may be off-base, In-House SEOs do enjoy some influence in the SERPs rankings for their site subject verticals, and some of them are undoubtedly paid well for their roles. Due to concerns about proprietary intellectual property, most In-House SEOs have to be fairly quiet about their work. Even so, some of them have engaged with public technological community, and a number of them blog to various degrees or are active in other ways.

In-house SEO specialists have some advantages that outsiders can’t have. They know their own technical environment - servers, networks, domains, specialty applications, content, internal analytics, and they’re experienced in their own industry with its unique needs and concerns. In a lot of cases, an outsider can’t do as good a job at designing and integrating an optimization strategy as an in-house resource. Even considering this, external SEO firms shouldn’t bash internal SEOs quite so defensively - many in-house search marketers still call in consultants and service providers for special projects.

I’m an In-House SEO (among other roles). I was curious about who my peers were in this arena, so I’ve set out to identify some of the top In-House SEOs here. It’s not possible to identify anywhere close to all of them, and I’m likely just scratching the surface here. I’m mainly interested in those others who blog, though I’m open to listing any I find. I’m trying to focus on SEOs for top-ranked companies and huge internet sites.

This is still a very nascent specialization in many ways, so there’s not just a whole lot of standardization of titles, compensation levels, etcetera. Many companies now refer to the role as “Search Marketing Manager”, though some have identified greater strategic need and importance with the work and have assigned the title of “Search Director” or “Vice President of Search Marketing” for it. In many cases, the role may also involve SEM work as well, and in larger companies, there may be a number of specialists all working on aspects of the overall optimization work. (For a nice breakdown of some common SEO roles, check out Rand’s posting on SEOmoz about comparative pay rates.)

I’m not really differentiating between those who are full employees of the companies they optimize for, and those who were perhaps full employees and then moved out to consult solely for those same companies in order to perhaps gain higher levels of pay while reducing the pains which come with working inside mega-corporations. Where possible, I’m linking to their blogs, and failing that, I’m linking to one of their personal profiles. In a few cases these are individuals that I know, but most of those listed I came across through internet research, so be aware that there’s potentially a high degree of error involved in the list. Also, I’m a bit arbitrary about those I chose - I tried to focus on widely-recognized name-brand sites, internet juggernauts, and well-established companies.

Some of the Top In-House SEOs:

Amr Awadallah : Director Product/Business Intelligence at Yahoo! Inc.

Aidan Beanland : Regional SEO Manager at Yahoo - Aidan is also a frequent speaker at Search Engine Bootcamp in Australia and he’ll be speaking at Search Summit Australia.

Jennifer Blamy : SEO Manager at LendingTree.com

Jessica Bowman : Director of SEO for Business.com - Jessica sometimes writes articles for SearchEngineJournal.com, and oversees optimization and SEM for the Business.com directory of sites.

Michael Brito : Search Marketing Manager at HP

David Carberry : Director of Search Marketing for Advertising.com

Steve Carrod : Search Marketing Manager (EMEA) at Hewlett-Packard

Gene Chan : Search Marketing Manager at Imaging & Printing Group - HP

Michael Cheung : Search Marketing Lead at Marchex

Kathleen Coughlan : Strategic Alliances & Search Marketing at Lexis Nexis

Terry Cox : SEO/SEM Manager for Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online.

Christopher Curtis : Associate Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Shopzilla.com - Christopher has also apparently written a few articles on search marketing topics, if you search around.

Darren Dalasta : Search Marketing Manager at WhitePages.com

Rudy DeDominicis : Search Marketing Specialist at Time Inc Interactive - Rudy previously did search marketing for Ziff Davis, AOL, and Paper.com.

John Ellis : Online Marketing Manager, Search for ResortQuest / Gaylord Entertainment - optimizing for GaylordHotels.com, Opry.com, and ResortQuest.com

Matt Evans : SEO Manager at Monster.com

Duane Forrester : Manager, Search Marketing at Sports Direct Inc. - Duane is also a SEMPO Board member.

Derek Fulford : Search Marketing Manager at The Weather Channel Interactive - Weather Channel had a news story earlier this year about how effective their SEO project uses analytics heavily.

Jason Hall : Director, Search Engine Marketing at Shopzilla.com

Seth Hammac : Search Engine Marketing Media Manager at CNET Networks

Julie Handleman-Baerwald : SEO/SEM Manager at Citysearch

Liz Keller : Manager of SEO Strategy at iVillage, Inc.

Mia Kemp : SEO and Sr. Project Manger - Marketing at Kaplan University

Imran Khan : Chief Marketing Officer at E-Loan.

Vic Kuzmovich : Director Online Marketing at Expert Realty - Vic was formerly SEO for WebMD’s Medscape.com property.

Rob Lenderman : SEO Architect at LendingTree.com

Jeff Leong : Sr. Online Marketing Specialist at Symantec Corporation.

Laura Lippay : SEO for Yahoo! - Laura earlier did SEO for CNET, and she now works upon Yahoo properties.

Paul Low : Search Marketing Manager at JCPenney.com

Bill Macaitis : VP of Traffic Generation and SEM / SEO for Fox Interactive Media (MySpace, FoxSports, IGN Ent).

Philip Maher : Director of SEO at LocalLaunch! a subsidiary owned by Dex Media.

Matt McGee : SEO for Marchex - specializing in optimization for local search, and small business websites. Marchex has made a name for itself by buying up tons of local-oriented domain names based on vertical keywords, city names, vertical + city name combinations, and zip codes in a sort of domainer or “direct navigation” strategy, and they recently have started working on improving the quality of all those many sites.

Sean McGinnis : Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Findlaw

Andy Mihalop : Head of Search Marketing at Reed Business Information

Melanie Mitchell : Director, SEO/SEM at AOL - Melanie handles SEO/SEM for AOL.com, MapQuest, AIM, Netscape and TMZ.com. Melanie has spoken at past PubCons and SES Conferences.

Mike Moran : Distinguished Engineer / Product Manager of IBM’s OmniFind Search Product - Mike has worked for IBM for nearly 30 years, and is expert in search technology, search marketing, content management, personalization, analytics, and more. Mike also speaks at conferences such as SES, ad:tech, Consumer Reports WebWatch, OMMA East, and Enterprise Search Summit. Mike has applied paid and natural search optimization strategies for IBM properties.

Iestyn Mullins : SEM Manager at SHOP.COM

Michael Nguyen : SEO Strategist at Shopzilla.

Paul O’Brien : SEO for HP - Paul also guestblogs some here at Natural Search Blog.

Giovanna O’Grady : SEM/SEO Manager at Intuit

Paul Pedersen : Manager Search Engine Marketing at E W Scripps - overseeing search marketing efforts for a handful of major Scripps sites.

Dan Perry : SEO Producer, Cars.com - Dan previously managed enough .EDUs to make any good SEO salivate, Dan now works on Cars.com, an acquisition of NewCars.com and has been a board member of SEMPO and has spoken at various conferences, including Emetrics, SES (San Jose, Chicago, Toronto and NY), and ad:tech.

David Perez : SEO/PPC Manager for eHarmony

Robert Pettee : Search Marketing Manager at LendingTree, LLC

Amy Pickwick : Web Communications Manager at USinternetworking, an AT&T company

Antonella Pisani : Director of Search Engine Marketing & Optimization at ProFlowers - 2004 Washington Post news story mentions her: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4969899/

Roni Raulwing : International Program Manager - Mobile & Devices at Adobe, Inc.

Greg Reitman : Manager, Search Marketing at Barnes & Noble .com

Jennifer Wood (Rodriguez) : Online Marketing Manager at The Seattle Times

Thomas Shaffer : Sr. Search Media Analyst at Microsoft

Aaron Shear : Global Director of SEO for Shopping.com - Aaron previously worked at Inktomi and then consulted for a few SEO firms. Aaron now focuses on optimizing for Shopping.com’s 50 million plus products.

Marshall D. Simmonds : chief Search Strategist for New York Times, overseeing SEM/SEO for NYTimes.com, Boston.com, IHT.com and About.com.

Scott Skurnick : Director SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at Edmunds.com - previously did search marketing for Circuit City.

Chris Silver Smith : Head of the Technology & Development Department, Idearc Superpages.com - perhaps needless to say, but I count myself in this list, too! I did research on SEO for Superpages many years ago, and I founded the SEO program which has been quite effective. I performed SEO for GTE, then advised for some Verizon sites, and I now do this for Idearc. Verizon spun off our company in November of this past year to form the publicly-traded Idearc Media Corporation. I founded Idearc’s new SEO Council which I also chair. I’ve been guest-blogging here at Natural Search Blog, and I sometimes speak at SES conferences. I’ll likely be speaking at the SES Conference in New York this April.

Jennifer Mathews Somogyi : SEO Manager at Classmates.com

Julie Sun : Senior Manager, SEO at MTV Networks

David Temple : Search Marketing Consultant at FindLaw

Patrick Terrell : Affiliate and Search Marketing Manager at PETCO - Patrick will also be speaking on the SEO panel at the Online Marketing Summit 07

Mike Banks Valentine : Senior SEO Manager at Fox Interactive Media

Julie VanMersbergen : Team Lead, Search Marketing at FindLaw

Tanya Reitze Vaughan : Search Engine Marketing & Optimization, Web Marketing Hewlett-Packard (HP) - Tanya has spoken at SES before on in-house SEO work.

Alfonso Veggetti : Senior Marketing Analyst at Washington Mutual

Meg Walker : Online Marketing Manager at Network Solutions - Meg specializes in online marketing, PPC management, banner advertising, search optimization.

Frank Watson : SEM Manager at FXCM (Forex Capital Markets) - Frank is also known as AussieWebmaster in his moderator role at Search Engine Watch’s forums.

Anthony Ziehmke : Search Marketing Strategist at Microsoft

Sandra Zoratti : Director, Marketing and Strategy at IBM - Sandra will also be speaking on the SEO panel at the Online Marketing Summit 07

For any of you out there who I may’ve overlooked, email me your info and I’ll update this list. Likewise, if I missed your blog link, please send me that.

UPDATE: I’ve had to halt additions to this posting, because I was simply inundated! You’re welcome to send me information about you, or recommendations for additions, and I may do an additional post listing “in-houses” in the future. But for now, I can’t accommodate further additions to this list.