The one thing I DON'T recommend is to just "throw money at it," and walk away. SEO is an on-going, critical activity that needs to be managed for the long haul. It is important that someone at a senior level in-house gain enough knowledge about what is important, to be able to monitor it from a management perspective. Otherwise, you risk really going off track, regardless how you decide to handle the implementation. In particular, there is a tendency to simply "outsource" activities that management isn't comfortable with. The problem is that there are a number of "quick fix" artists in SEO, who claim to bring you a lot of traffic fast. They use questionable practices that can get you in trouble with the Search Engines, and in the long run have the opposite effect from what you are seeking. If you don't have a senior manager that understands the implications of what's being done, you can get burned.



RECOMMENDATIONS

So let's say that you've decided to "do it yourself", or at least want to get a basic understanding of the SEO process. Where do you start?

Here's what I recommend:

*Buy and read a popular Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing book to become conversant

*Purchase one of the Search Engine Optimization Software Packages which are available for a few hundred dollars--I use Web Position from Webtrends

Once you've become familiar, here are the important basic steps that you'll want to make sure that you understand:

1. Select keywords to optimize you site for, ones that are important to your potential clients and your business. Look at your own website and other marketing materials, look at your competitor's sites, and use tools like WordTracker and the Overture and Google Adwords Keyword tools. This is a critical part of the process--you need to select keywords that are both relevant, and not so competitive that you are still able to "own them"--in other words, appear in the top 6 listings when they are searched.

2. Make sure that your Page titles and Page URLs are rich with the selected keywords. This is very important, and is why new websites should be optimized for search, when they are initially built (which usually doesn't' happen, unfortunately).

3. Include keyword-rich "link text" in your content, and make sure to label all images with keyword-rich text.

4. Make your main body text keyword rich--and probably more text intensive than your graphics designers would like. Even though the designers (and senior executives) may think its ugly, search engines love--and only understand--text. Some engines will even completely ignore pages with less than 300 words. If your pages appear too "clean and pretty", there's a good chance they will be ignored by the search engine bots when they do their indexing. So you need to make some compromises between SEO and look and feel.

5. Start a "never-ending" campaign to get external websites to create links into your site. This is also critical, because search engines use this is a measure of how "important" your site is, relative to your competitors. The more relevant and popular the linking site is, the better, but any link is better than no link. PR is a great way to build relevant links--but you can also have a clerk trolling for simple opportunities to list your company's website, in the myriad directories available on the Internet.

SEO is actually a very complex field with lots of important, but mundane technical details. Much more can be done past this process to optimize your site. But these are the basics--if you run through this process, you will as a senior manager, be much better prepared to buy external SEO services, or hire people for your internal staff. As a C-level manager, you wouldn't feel comfortable being ignorant as to how the PR process works, would you?

In the Internet age, neither can you afford to be ignorant about SEO!

As always, your feedback is welcomed.