Can you believe it? Your SEO campaign can actually be a positive thing for the IT department. Here are a few examples:

Interdepartmental Collaboration Bringing together the efforts of marketers, wordsmiths, artists, and techies is a positive thing. Surprising new relationships, new alliances, and synergies can result.

Recognition for IT It's not often that IT tasks can directly result in sales and profits. This is one of those times. Participating in the SEO campaign can bring the IT department out of the obscurity of the computer rooms and give them some of the attention and acclaim that they deserve.

A Cleaned-Up Site Programmers are big, big fans of streamlined source code. Tools like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) create tidier websites and tidy helps the search engines distinguish between the back-end code of your page and the text that's meant for your visitors to read. If you're ever looking for some tech love, try buttering them up with this line: “Is there any way we can work on separating presentation from content on our website?”

Can you think of any other ways that SEO might be positive for IT in your organization?

Graphic Designers

Graphic designers are those creative souls responsible for the look and feel of your website. In a larger organization, style developers create the style guides that all of the other web page creators have to follow. In a smaller company, you may be dealing with just a few designers or even an individual who is a combination of graphic designer and web developer. The graphics portion of the SEO team is responsible for setting up search engine–friendly standards in the style guide, if there is one; soliciting input from the SEO team leader during site updates; and, because SEO has a way of dropping off the radar after a while, making sure that the standards are mandatory and ongoing. If you're on your own, you won't have anyone else to persuade. But if you're assembling an SEO team that includes Graphics, you've got some convincing to do! You'll have the best chance at success with this department if you include the following steps:

- Recognize the value of the work that the graphics department does.

- Educate about graphics-related SEO skills.

- Formalize your agreements.

Let's look at these three steps in depth.

Value Graphics

First, recognize the importance of what your designers do. Like the IT department, graphic designers often feel that their efforts are undervalued. The “look” of a site is not just an aside. In a visual medium, the look is the fundamental substance of your visitors' experience. And it's not just a cosmetic thing your designers are responsible for usability factors as well. Your organization may have the benefit of user testing, or the designs may be created in a more seat-of-the-pants fashion. Either way, we can tell you this right now:

In our experience, we have found that designers' preferences are often initially at odds with optimization for search engines. A conflict between SEO and graphic designers exists because SEO is, at least in part, optimizing the website for a nonhuman visitor (a search engine robot), while designers are entirely focused on the human user experience.

As the ambassador of SEO, your job is to find common ground. Sit down with the leadership the department head, the style guide developer, the senior designer, or whoever happens to have the website graphic files on their computer and figure out how you can make SEO work for everybody. A website that nobody can find is worthless, but you certainly don't want a site that people immediately leave because the design doesn't speak to them. So you must recognize and acknowledge this fact: Make a commitment to the graphics department that you will never sacrifice the human user experience for SEO.

P.J. Fusco: “Educate-Inform-Transform”

P.J. Fusco is a popular writer in the SEO industry, and the search strategist for a large SEO firm. She shared her philosophy of “educate-inform-transform,” explaining that building a successful campaign is all about “empowering others with the knowledge and passion to champion a project through the organization.”

Here, in her own words, is how it works:

- “When you reveal keyword research to a copywriter or editor… they take greater responsibility for the words they choose.”

- “When you show a Flash programmer how the search engines ‘see' their work, it's a lot easier to convince them to wrap a Flash program in more search engine friendly code.”

- “When you show a designer that search engines can't read the words embedded in an image… all of a sudden, you get more words and fewer images built into site designs.”

- “When you show a Sales & Marketing VP the return on investment made in a PPC campaign that has positively impacted top-line sales and bottom-line profits, you get bigger budgets for more campaigns.”

As the head of the SEO team, you become more than an SEO expert.You also become educator, project manager, cheerleader, and most of all, communicator. P.J. talks about her days as a successful in-house search engine marketing manager:“Keeping different departments informed about the status of a project takes meetings, instant messages, phone calls, conference calls, and the occasional pop-in if someone missed a meeting or conference call. It takes organization, too, in order to keep up with who is doing what, when, where, how, and why.”

But despite all of your best efforts, there can still be bumps in the road. P.J. has been known to take extreme measures:“If I need the telecom team to get DNS set up for a new site, I've learned to bribe them with cookies.”

Writers and Editors

Writers and editors are the wordsmiths who craft the all-important text that your site audience, and the search engines, will see. Since SEO is so focused on text, you are going to need some writers in your corner. Writers and editors can help with these important SEO tasks: keyword brainstorming, writing or rewriting content with keywords (and linkability) in mind, writing or reviewing ad content, and establishing a process for SEO review of new content.

If you're doing this yourself, be prepared to spend a good portion of your SEO time on writing, keyword research, and related tasks.

Writers are a natural choice as SEO coconspirators. Unfortunately, SEO is often perceived among writers as something that will force them to alter, or maybe even degrade, their creative content. If you've ever seen a page of text that was written primarily for the benefit of search engines (see Figure 5.1), you know that writing for robots just isn't something that your human audience will respond to.

So just as you did with your graphic designers, start your conversation with a promise: The human audience will always be the most important. In fact, the whole point of Your SEO Plan is to bring in that audience and speak to them, clearly, in their own language. Including your writers in the keyword brainstorming process will give them important information about the terminology your target audience is using, which they can then incorporate into their text. If you educate your writers on concepts like keywords and compelling page titles, that means less rewriting in the SEO review process. That's less work for you and more control for your writers. SEO also provides an opportunity for writers to branch out and write content that isn't solely there to promote your product or service. Since linkability increases when a site offers useful or interesting noncommercial content, you can encourage your writers to add things like articles, news, and resource pages to the site. These might be projects that writers are interested in. Ask them for ideas. Of course, one big step in making your website text more SEO friendly is to make sure the text is actually present:

So coordinate with the web designers to make sure that screen real estate can be allocated for descriptive text and that graphic titles can be changed to HTML. Then you can approach your writers with specific ideas and locations for SEO-related improvements.

Executives and Product Managers

The decision makers in your organization have a lot on their minds these days: Shrinking budgets, expanding competition, and out-of-control expenses could keep anyone awake at night. Why should they be open to your big ideas about SEO? Even if SEO was the boss's idea in the first place or if you're your own boss you still need to know, in a down-to-the-brass-tacks kind of way, what it's going to take.

Of course, you want to approach your corporate decision makers with a clear vision, a plan, and a lot of cold, hard facts. But there's a catch-22 here: How can you know exactly what Your SEO Plan will cost and what it will accomplish until you have spent some time researching those very questions? Executives aren't big fans of laying out cash for an unknown outcome. So we recommend that you start the process by seeking approval for an initial, investigatory month. That's roughly 20 hours of labor at 1 hour per day, and it's all laid out for you in the next article. You'll spend your Prep Month figuring out what kind of performance your SEO campaign can expect and be able to come back to the executives with a much more complete plan on hand. Your initial request will be introductory. Prepare it with the following information on hand:

- A general introduction to SEO: what it is and how it is being used in the marketing mix by many companies today. For starters, try the “Why SEO?” numbers from the introduction to this article.

- Your Goals Worksheet from article 1.

- Some telling screen shots showing your competition outranking you, your brand looking awful onscreen, or any other SEO faux pas you can find.

- A detailed timeline for the Prep Month.

Be prepared for plenty of questions from around the table: How much will this really cost us? How long do we have to do it? Do we have the right staff in-house? SEO is such a cost-effective marketing technique that it should be an easy sell. But change is never easy. Does budgeting your SEO campaign mean that Ellen will have to take Tim's Yellow Pages budget away? Will an hour a day of SEO mean someone is an hour late for dinner each night? No matter how persuasive your numbers and worksheets are, your plan will need to address the realities of day-to-day operations.

Once your executives are ready to move on your SEO project, be sure you get not just a green light, but a little bit of gas in the tank as well. Here's what you'll need them to do:

- Vocalize the plan to the team.

- Commit to your proposed labor and budget.

- Commit to reviewing your findings after you have completed your Prep Month.

Working in SEO can sometimes feel like wrestling a many-armed sea animal. How will you tame the beast and get some solid results? Start with a “do what we can” attitude, stay on target with your goals, and remember: Solo beast-taming may be muy macho, but taming with friends is a lot more effective.

Get Yourself on Board!

As SEO team leader, you may have to step slightly outside of your comfort zone in order to be as effective as you can be.You will have to keep yourself organized, which entails documenting results, questions, and communications as you go. And like any team leader, you will sometimes need to repeat yourself politely until you get that requested task completed or that important concept understood. If it helps to take some of the pressure off, you as SEO project leader can comfortably adopt a friendly, easy-going approach. Since SEO isn't normally a deadline-driven process most of the time you'll have the opportunity to write “No rush” on your requests and mean it!

Now that you understand how to drum up the requisite levels of enthusiasm throughout your organization, you're ready to start your Prep Month. As you do the research in the next article, you're likely to uncover some interesting, and possibly surprising, findings about your own site that you can share with your team.