A raising number of the businesses are linked one way or another to the Internet, and with it in some way with the search engine optimisation (SEO). Interment marketing plays the more and more important role every day, simply since people use internet more and more in their everyday life. Even if you see something in your local shop, you are quite likely to go online and just check the prices in the other shops, and the user reviews, the manufacturers web site…

Companies know nowadays they need to invest heavily in the Internet Marketing. Pay Per Click (PPC) is where almost everyone starts, just being seduced by the simplicity and the transparency of it. Of and not to forget – the low cost entry to the market. Some take a few days, but the majority of the PPC advertisers require more than a year to realise the real costs of the PPC, and get to the ‘Panic Mode’ looking for anything else but PPC after realising how little they got for their money invested.

A strategically important decision is usually made then, to stop the PPC and get down the organic listing route and optimise the company web site for the search engines. SEO usually then becomes a ‘Hot Potato’ in the company. If there is a separate Marketing Department and the IT Department, they will try to pass it on to each other. IN reality, the likelihood that any of the internal resources knows enough about SEO is fairly slim, since SEO is not what the company has been doing so far. So a new type of task is now within the company, and a new skill is required. The management usually fails to understand the fact that the SEO skills do not exist within the staff of the company. Therefore the majority of the initial SEO efforts are performed ‘in house’. When no results are achieved, or the results have no impact at the bottom line, the question gets raised:

To outsource or not to outsource the SEO, the question is now….?

Management will be guided by the costs of the both options to determine what route to go. Seeing the quotes from the SEO companies, as opposed to the ‘zero’ cost of performing the SEO internally puts them in front of the simple position to decide to keep the SEO in house!

This is the list of questions that should help determining if to outsource or keep the SEO in house:
1. Do we have a resources available to allocate to the SEO?
2. Do we have anyone who knows how to do SEO tasks?
3. Do we know what tasks are actually required to be done at all?
4. Do we know how much will the training cost to get our staff in the position to do SEO tasks?
5. Do we know how much time will be required to get the staff trained, and when will the training be available?
6. Do we know what is our SEO goal (why do we do it actually) in the exact numbers?
7. Can we measure our SEO successes (and failures)?
8. What is the budget for the SEO software and online tools required to perform the SEO tasks?

The above are really just the basic questions. If you cannot answer just one of those, the likelihood of any effect of your internal SEO efforts on your business are very slim.

Here is a short check list to help you answer the question:

1. URL Rewriting
Long gone are the days where there was gibberish in the web addresses or the URLs. Funnily enough all content management systems still work with those long and complex URLs. The smart CMS-es today have a built in URL Rewriting. What does it do? It changes your URL from the gibberish looking long one to something that looks like http://domain-name/page-title. It is nice to read to both the search engine and to human. It is also memorable as opposed to the long strings of numbers and symbols. When used properly, by placing the search keywords in the parts of the URL like the domain name itself and the title of the page, a great search engine optimisation results are achieved.
2. Dynamic Title Tag
Title is a HTML tag of a huge importance in relation to the search engine optimisation of each of your page. Notice the word ‘each’ here highlighted. Since there is very little sense in having two pages on the same web site with the same title. If your CMS does not let you create the unique title tag to every single page, your web site will not be very well optimised.
3. Dynamic Meta Tags
Meta Keywords and Meta Description are the two met tags important for the search engine optimisation. As well as the title tag, if your CMS should allow the author to define the both Meta Keywords and Meta Description uniquely for each page. Note that search engine often use the Meta Description as a description of your page displayed next to the link in their search engine results pages. Therefore it is vital to write a Meta Description ‘inviting’ the surfer to click on your listing.
4. H1, H2 Styles
Search engines assign ‘higher importance’ to words used in the top highlighted styles on the page. Placing your main keywords in those styles is crucial part of the onsite search engine optimisation. If your CMS does not let you control what text gets displayed in what style your web pages will not be well optimised for the search engines.

The list actually goes on and on. Image names and Alt Tags of the images, link structures of the internal links are also very important. The problem with the content management systems is really in drawing the line between the features that will help the user in using them quickly and easily, and allowing the user to control the code of the web site. That line is hard to place, and the result is that most of the content management system simply fail since they do not find the way how to give a lot of control to the end user, while making the user interface and the usage in general easy to learn and to use day by day. From the SEO perspective, there should be as much control as possible of the final code, but from the usability point it is the opposite. A good user interface for the CMS should be easy to use and let you control the above points easily as well.

1. Low hanging fruit
When a web site is being optimised for a search phrase that almost no other web site is optimised for (at least not intentionally) it is usually fairly easy to get super high ranking super fast. Take a 3 or 4 word search phrase and you can rank almost any web site high for it in no time. The approach is called a ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ since you can really easy get the ‘juice’ (traffic) out to the search engine for a very long phrase.

2. Big Boys SEO
Optimising a web site for a highly used single word search phrase like Cars, Jobs, Travel or Insurance, is the other end of the search engine optimisation. It does differ quite a lot from optimising a web site for a multiple words phrases. Usually far more statistical analysis are utilised. A very definite and precise methodologies are required. Why? Simply because you are not the only one in the playing field here. All your competitors will be optimising for the same keyword. The time required for a decent ranking result is very long, and no stellar success is to be expected. Search engine results pages do not change that much for the single word search phrases at all. Some single words when entered in the search engine generate the same search results listed in the same order for many months!

Should you optimise a web site for a single words phrases or for a multiple words search phrases? The following statistics published by OneStat.com will help you:

The 7 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:

1. - 2 word phrases - 32.58%
2. - 3 word phrase - 25.61%
3. - 1 word phrases - 19.02%
4. - 4 word phrases - 12.83%
5. - 5 word phrases - 5.64%
6. - 6 word phrases - 2.32%
7. - 7 word phrases - 0.98%

Two word phrases are the most used search phrases in the search engines. And now even more surprising to the most of us is the fact that the three word phrases are closely following! Only then do a single word phrases come in the picture with less than one fifth if the overall traffic. Having a insurance web site listed 1st in Google for the word ‘Insurance’ will only bring one fifth of the (possible) traffic for that single word listing. Optimising your pages forthe two and search phrases containing two and three keywords will bring the majority of the traffic to any web site.