The New SEO – Search Engine Organization!

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 soccer World Cup Finals being the talk of the town again, 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.

When 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.

The midfielder works with the “defense” to ensure the correct messaging is incorporated into all product marketing.

He 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.