In-House SEO vs. Out-House SEO
Not long ago I posted a list of some Top In-House SEOs I identified, and I touched on the subject of in-house development vs. outsourcing of natural search optimization work. As an “in-houser” myself (as one of my many roles, I perform SEO for Superpages.com’s sites), I thought I’d develop this out further and give my thoughts on the relative pros and cons of in-housing versus outsourcing, followed up by a list of the merits of doing either.
I should mention that my reference to “Out-House SEO” is firmly tongue-in-cheek. WebMama used that term in commenting on my previous post, and I couldn’t resist using it myself. (Coincidentally, I see that she’s just yesterday posted an article on the merits of outsourcing SEM work, “Does Hiring a Search Marketing Firm Cost or Save You Money?“)
Read on for my commentary and lists of the relative advantages of each approach.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/28/2007
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Filed under: General, Marketing in-house, in-house-SEO, inhousing, insourcing, insourcing-SEO, out-house-SEO, outsourcing, outsourcing-SEO
New Columnist for Search Engine Land
I just became a new contributor for Search Engine Land with the publication of my first article today:
“Google Builds Local Map Content in 3D“. As you may recall, Danny Sullivan launched SearchEngineLand.com back in December of last year after stepping down as editor-in-chief for SearchEngineWatch.com which he’d originally founded. I’m contributing work under the Locals Only column that was earlier launched with their correspondent, Greg Sterling. As you may know, Greg Sterling was a former member of the Kelsey Group, and is widely respected as a top authority/commentator/analyst on marketing/business in the local search space.
I was really surprised and flattered to’ve been invited to contribute – I’ve long been a fan and devoted reader of the folx who worked upon SearchEngineWatch.com and now SearchEngineLand.com. I’ve also been a longtime reader of articles by Sterling, along with many others in my company, Idearc Media. I think I’m in really august company, and I know it’s going to challenge me to try to put forward work that’s worthy of appearing under their masthead along with others in the same space.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/26/2007
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Filed under: General, Local Search, Reference Material local-search-articles, Search-Engine-Land, searchengineland.com
Upcoming Speaking Gigs
I have a few speaking gigs coming up for any of you who are interested. I’ll be speaking first in April at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, on the Images & Search Engines panel on the topic of Optimization Through Image Sharing Sites:
The talk focuses primarily upon optimizing via Flickr, since my comparison research indicates that Flickr has the best potential for natural search optimization. You’ll notice that my postings here at Natural Search Blog increasingly have illustrations accompanying them, and I’ve typically hosted those through Flickr just for the SEO value in an effort to “practice what I preach”. 😉
I’ll also be speaking at the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Engine Marketing in April (San Francisco), May (New York), and June (Chicago) on the subject of “Organic Search is All About Content”. These one-day conferences will have some other great guests such as Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts, Amanda Camp and Vanessa Fox from Google, Eric Ward the link-building expert, Paul O’Brien from HP, and others.
I hope to see you there!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/25/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, General, Image Optimization AMA-Hot-Top-Series, AMA-Search-Engine-Marketing, American-Marketing-Association-Hot-Topic-Series-on-Sear, search-engine-strategies, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, ses, SES-Conference
Travel by Amtrak – a bit rough
I mentioned earlier that my mother and I took my nephew for a train trip to St. Louis for Spring Break this past week. My nephew is a train fanatic (my former sister-in-law now refers to trains as “porn for eight-year-old boys”), so this was to be the trip of a lifetime for him — we arranged a destination which would ensure that we’d sleep overnight on the train, and we booked one of their first-class bedroom accommodations for the trip.
The trip was indeed a lot of fun for my nephew, and it was an intellectually interesting experience for my mother and I. But, it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as we sort of imagined before leaving.
Read on for further description and for my tips for Amtrak train travel.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/20/2007
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Filed under: General Amtrak, Railroad-Travel, Railway-Travel, Trains, travel
On Vacation in St. Louis
I’m on vacation all this week in beautiful St. Louis, hence fewer blog postings from me for the moment.
My mother and I are taking my nephew (8yr old) here for sightseeing, and because the Amtrak train from Dallas to here was perfect. He’s a train fanatic, so this was the trip of a lifetime for him. For us, the train wasn’t nearly so luxurious as you might’ve imagined… but, more on that I’ll save for a later post.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/14/2007
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Filed under: General Arches, Gateway-Arch, St.-Louis
Google Cubed: Our Cubes are Bigger than Google’s!
This past month we noticed that a company started moving into the empty office space adjacent to ours. We’re located in Texas, inside the great Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The office space in the strip of buildings next to us has been vacant a long time. Some of our customer-care folx stopped and asked the electricians who was going to be moving in: it’s Google.
A few of us in management were a bit concerned, because it was entirely odd that Google would choose, out of the entire, huge, gigantic, sprawling metro area, to park themselves *smack* next to us! We couldn’t help but wonder if they were planning to lure away some of our advertising specialists! After all, we knew that they apparently had a small office in nearby Irving where they had AdSense optimizers, so it was conceivable that they might think that poaching our employees might give them skilled people quickly. There’s so much office space in the entire metro area, that it virtually defied reason to consider that they only coincidentally located offices next to us.
However, one of our marketing staff finally came back with the intel that this was to be offices for Google Radio (aka “Google Audio Ads”)Â — not something all that related to what we do. So, maybe it is coincidence, and not a snarky attempt to leach away our talent.
The workmen appear to’ve mostly finished setup, and it seems like people are starting to work in the building. So, I strolled over there after work and took some pics through the windows. I was stunned to see that Google’s cubes are actually smaller than ours!
(click on the pic to enlarge)
Read on for more description and more pics.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/09/2007
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Filed under: General, Google cube-bling, cube-decor, cubes, cubicles, Google-Audio-Ads, Google-Radio, office-cubes, superpages, work-environments
Game of Life Updated
I just noticed that my Chromatic Game of Life utility wasn’t displaying properly for FireFox – my bad! I had added in FireFox support when I built it, but I somehow failed to upload it.
| Â | Â | Â | Â | Â |
FireFox users would’ve called up the utility and not seen any grid, so it wouldn’t have been apparent that they should click on the squares to set up initial state patterns to iterate through.
This has been corrected, and I also added in very brief instructions to improve usability for those unfamiliar with Conway’s Game of Life. Check it out at the Chromatic Game of Life page.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/02/2007
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Filed under: General, Research and Development, Tools cellular-automata, conways-game-of-life, firefox, game-of-life, games
In other news, a new free Clinic
Search Engine Journal today opened free SEO Clinic for sites in need of optimization or with specific challenges that have not been overcome.
A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).
It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences. If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse. I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see. That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).
To participate, simply contact the team here.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/27/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, General, HTML Optimization, Link Building, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Site Structure, Spiders help, optimization, review, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO-consulting, SEO-critiques, website-design
Some Top In-House SEOs
In-House SEOs are a special demographic of optimization specialists that we don’t hear a lot about. Circumspect, they toil in the shadows while controlling vast networks of links and content of some of the highest-ranked sites on the internet. Many of the articles about in-sourcing versus out-sourcing of SEO seem to be biased in favor of optimization firms. Independent SEOs often view In-House SEOs enviously, assuming that they are paid premiums for optimization work of sites that already have natural degrees of PR due to prestige and already-existing marketshare.
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.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/27/2007
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Filed under: General, SEO in-house-search-engine-marketing, in-house-seos, insourcing, SEO
Blog Tag – You’re It!
Okay, so, I’m late to the Blogtag game, but better late than never, right? I’m not sure who came up with this, but the idea behind the game is that you have to tell 5 things about yourself that most of your readers might not know, and then “tag” five other bloggers by linking to them. Stephan tagged me back around Christmas timeframe, and I was so busy vacationing, and then getting back into work-groove that I neglected to play out my piece in this cool little SEO meme. So, here goes.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:
1. – I’m fascinated by the Voynich Manuscript. It’s compelling to me as an enduring mystery — likely one of the top seven mysteries in the modern world. Many cryptographers and linguists have attempted to decode it, and failed!
If I thought it was more than an antique hoax, I’d be writing my own Perl scripts to try to break the code down. My first decoding book was written by Martin Gardner, and I used what I learned from it in third grade to break a coded message I found in my great-great-grandmother’s autograph book. I guess the takeaway is that I’m just damn compelled by puzzles. I used to compete with people in high school to see who was the fastest at solving mixed-up Rubik’s Cubes. I think my record was right around 42 seconds. (I’m not that fast anymore, but I’m obviously still a geek.)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/16/2007
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, General, Link Building blog-tag, Link Building, linkbait, Links
