Mexican Fans by Celso Flores (image added by sombrero expert optimizer Tad of SEO 2.0)
“The New SEO – Search Engine Organization!” is a guest post by Albert Gouyet, Vice President of Product Marketing, BrightEdge.
With the World Cup Finals in South Africa already becoming a distant memory, it’s that time again to draw analogies between team sports and marketing activities. Today’s topic: SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Disclaimer: if you are a soccer fanatic, still struggling to come to grips with your country’s failure to win the World Cup, you probably should stop reading now! All others please read on…
In this World Cup we saw the success of teams with a balanced structure that exhibited high-levels of co-operation
- think
- Spain
- Holland
- Germany
- and the failure of those that relied primarily on the brilliance of individual players – think Brazil, Argentina, and England. (Italy and France were so bad, they fall into a category of their own!)
What does this have to do with SEO? In most enterprises, SEO tends to be more of an “Argentina” when it needs to be more of a “Spain” – in other words, less dependent on an individual SEO specialist and more reliant on a team efforts, or a “search engine organization” approach.
You can have the most brilliant SEO mind in the world managing your SEO or you might have outsourced it to the premier SEO specialist firm. But if your web-developer updates your site without any understanding of the existing backlinks that are driving the authority for your natural search rankings, all their genius will count for naught! (For those of you who didn’t see it, Germany, with their team-base approach, destroyed Argentina 4-0!)
SEO Team Line-up
So what is the optimum team line up for the search engine organization?
Goal Keeper – Web Developer
If this guy drops the ball, you’re in trouble (ask England!). Often forgotten unless he makes a mistake, the web developer needs to ensure all the key internal and external links that drive the SEO authority are pointing to the right content.
Defense – Product Marketing
Very much a self-contained unit, just like the defense in a soccer team, the product marketing group lays the groundwork for a successful SEO operation. Leveraging the market intelligence generated by the SEO manager, this team incorporates the critical keywords into all marketing collateral and website material. They also need to avoid costly defensive mistakes; for example, breaking SEO by creating new content that targets keywords already covered by better pages.
Strikers – Marketing Communications/Media Relations
If these guys are shooting blanks, you’re not going much further than the group stages (again, ask England!) The life blood to a successful SEO operation is content that is relevant to your target market. Much of the content will be generated internally, but the real “goal” is to secure high profile articles in industry-respected media outlets with backlinks driving authority to your website.
Midfielder – the SEO Manager
The Maestro! He/she is in the middle of everything and orchestrates the SEO play. For example, he/she ensures that the “goalkeeper” is aware of the impact of website changes, works with the “defense” to ensure the correct messaging is incorporated into all product marketing, identifies sources of backlinks that need to be targeted, and works with the “strikers” to develop relevant content and backlinks, etc.
Sports analogies aside, for SEO to really be successful and become an integral, revenue driving part of your marketing program, it takes a team effort that is well coordinated, balanced and based on cooperation and playing off the strengths of the entire team, not just one individual.
When it comes to being a Search Engine Organization, are you Spain or France?
Albert Gouyet is BrightEdge’s Vice President of Product Marketing. He brings over 20 years of broad technology and senior management experience from Netscape, AOL, Sybase as well as venture backed private companies.
At AOL, Albert was Vice President of Web Clients and Services where he led the team responsible for developing and implementing a new strategy for Search for Netscape and CompuServe, which culminated with the game-changing partnership between AOL and Google.
For the record, Albert is a native of France and can be reached via email: agouyet at brightedge.com.
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- Authority and Trustrank
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This thing has 9 Comments
Great article!
Although, when it comes to SEO the finger is often pointed to the developer, when the generation of a site’s code these days, especially with the complexity of modern websites is a team effort.
This team is often made up of Information Architects, Engineers and Developers etc. etc. making the finger pointing towards just the developer an unjustified but all too often case.
A great example is a client of ours for whom we developed the front end code, then went and instructed the Engineers of the project to go and hide 99% of the content behind a login screen, grant zero access to Google or any other Search Engine. To make matters worse the client then went and instructed the Engineer to also do away with the News/Blog area of the last remaining 1% as this information was being written in facebook and had no place in the site.
Surprise, surprise 6 months later the site had disappeared from the Search Engine Radar and the client had found his site on the 27th page of Google! This then led to the above mentioned finger pointing.
So… let’s give the poor old Developer a chance here, it is not solely their fault when the ball gets dropped!
So there is NO misunderstanding, I am not accusing this article of finger pointing, just merely making a general observation.
Wow Nico. That’s a great or rather sad story. Consider adding it to
http://clientsfromhell.net/
This is a brilliant explanation of the SEO process and team effort it entails. Sometimes the connection between a designer/developer and SEO consultant can feel a bit disjointed so an article like this takes a look at the SEO campaign process as a whole instead of the individual process.
Hey its a brilliant writing. You describe the SEO technique in a new way. I am happy to get it. thanks.
Thanks for the great post. Different approach to SEO.
I agree in the team work aspect – perhaps where reliance on superstars fails is where their individual excellence does not include leadership. I personally always preach that SEO (like it’s close relation marketing) is something that every member of an organisation has to buy into – it has a much harder task in isolation.
In basketball a good SEO manager should the point guard am i right..or maybe wrong :)….but i love Spain soccer team..Now we will begin forming our new SEO team (TEAM)….thanks for this post this enlightened me..
Good Post. I like how you compare SEO to soccer; I definitely will try to be more like Spain.
Very well compared SEO with soccer, lolz.
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