As an SEO who has endured tours of duty in the three main job fields of SEO, I thought it may help to identify the benefits and hurdles of each area. Overall, each specific aspect of SEO relies upon one another in a variety of facets. Most importantly, knowledge sharing is consistent whether you work on a single website or a large amount of clients. SEO tactics change day to day, as do online marketing initiatives, and the SEO community as a whole adapts to these changes together.

SEO consulting offers the best and worst of both worlds; it just depends on what your personality type is and how you manage your resources. The perks of picking which clients you want to work with, the commanding hourly rate and nonexistent office hours are by far the biggest draw. When sales, billing, taxes and client management start to pile up you may start to second guess the daily gig. For me, it was when I could optimize a site and organic marketing campaign faster than I could sell or invoice for services rendered. It also took a toll on learning curves and the ability to reach out to others quickly when encountering an issue. The biggest downfall was having the authority to ensure implementations were done successfully and the desired results were achieved.

Client side SEO allowed the freedom to become an expert in niche markets. Since, typically, the work would be focused in one area, the freedom was there to explore every available opportunity to increase organic rankings or achieve the KPI’s for a specific website. The main hurdle with client side SEO work was how organic search fit into a company’s organizational structure. Was it marketing, development, or sales? Who was responsible for implementing changes? Who were the champions behind organic search? Who benefited? Often these questions were never answered, and windows of opportunity were missed.

All of this leads to agency SEO, a great mix of all the benefits and disadvantages of consulting and client side SEO. First off, I jumped ship for the client roster. Without a doubt, the lure of working with big brands was my main motivational goal for considering leaving the home office, traveling consistently, and joining what was the largest independent interactive agency in the world. The second reason was knowledge sharing. The ability to consult with web analytics specialists, user experience experts, and paid search teams can enhance an organic SEO campaign immensely. These offering, along with an in-house team of 40 SEOs, feed and technology experts provide all the necessary resources for a multitude of clients. As with any other SEO job, implementation is still the biggest hurdle and will continue to face the restrictions of legal reviews, coding guidelines and technology protocol.

Article by Sean Stahlman 

Last week, Sports Illustrated announced that it was moving forward in the Internet era by heading into the past. The magazine has launched the SI Vault, a dedicated archive covering 53 years worth of SI covers, articles, and videos. Readers can now relive NBA short shorts, Muhammad Ali and other great sports moments such as the Miracle on Ice.

Since “content is king,” membership content is a way for a publisher to increase loyalty as well as generate additional revenue.

SI is following the recent publisher trend of opening access to their content and removing password restrictions. Back in September 2007 the NY Times discontinued TimesSelect, a subscription service that allowed users’ to access all of their archived content.

Why the changes? There are several factors at play.

The first is simple: supply and demand. Though I have to be an ESPN Insider to read Peter Gammons, I can find plenty of free sources of sports content. Publishers recognize this and would rather have more users instead of the yearly subscription fees.

Cost analysis also leads into another decision around advertiser inventory. With the addition page views generated by unrestricted content, can the NY Times or SI generate more revenue from additional display inventory than from the subscription fees they were collecting? Quite possibly.

Another huge benefit of open access is what it does for search engine traffic. When a site requires a login, it prevents a search engine spider from accessing subscription content. If a site moves content to a subscription archive when it reaches a certain date, the content cannot reap long-term search traffic. John Squires, executive vice president of Time Inc., summed it up best:

“The real hidden value of this is what it does for search. We’ll have to work our way up the search algorithms over time, but eventually, someone searches Johnny Unitas, and SI.com is going to pop up.”

Article by Joshua Palau

Bid optimization is an integral part of retaining and increasing performance against conversion metrics. While it may be easy to make bidding decision for high volume and high value keywords, there are usually keywords that receive little to no impressions. In many instances these keywords remain untouched. When a keyword is in position 10 or greater, or has a limited amount of clicks, making a decision on what to do can be difficult. Using different look back periods on different types of keywords will ensure that you’re getting the most efficiency from them. It’s important to realize that if there are keywords that are seasonal, they are different from search terms that historically received few impressions.

Three tactics to consider employing are:
a.    Extend the date ranges when doing optimization for lower volume, longer tail terms
b.    Set quarterly reviews on keyword performance
c.    Try to bid these keywords up to see if a higher position results in more data to make a better performance assessment.

These tips will make it easier to find any low-hanging fruit or identify keywords that need to be removed.

Article by Luigi Ferguson

There has been very little talk on the Yahoo! acquisition front… until this week. Yahoo! is playing the hand it was dealt and may end up with a better takeover offer. Should a merger occur, there will be a lot of questions that need answering.

Mark Simon provides an extensive recap of the top SES NY themes.

SEO VP, Rob Aronson channels his inner REM fan in discussing “The End of the World As We Know It.” Don’t worry, he feels fine.