IT,Webmasters, and Programmers

Whether it's an IT department of 60 or a single programmer hiding out in the server room, your SEO campaign is going to need a lot of help from your company's technical experts. Not only will they be the final implementers of edits to your website, but they hold the keys to many important technical features of the site that can spell SEO success or failure.

What if you're a smaller organization and you are the one handling your own technical needs? Count yourself lucky in many ways you won't have the workload and communication conflicts that often arise between SEO and IT. But once you start doing SEO in earnest, be ready to plug into the tech mind-set a little more often than usual. At a minimum, you will need IT to help with edits to website content, web page redirects, server settings, programming standards, and the robots.txt file.

Sound overwhelming? It can be, if you don't prepare yourself. We suspect that dealing with your technical staff is going to be the most challenging part of your inhouse SEO adventure. We have observed three major areas of difficulty:

- IT and Marketing speak such different languages it may be hard to get the communication rolling.

- IT is likely to be extremely cautious about taking on any additional workload.

- It may be difficult to find a way that SEO excellence benefits the IT department.

There's a lot to say here, so let's discuss these three issues in more detail.

Communicating with IT

Your first task in working with IT will be finding a common language. Your IT comrades are technical thinkers. They like numbers, logic, specifications, and processes that can be repeated. They are less fond of mysterious or amorphous organic processes. They probably won't be responsive to a request unless they fully appreciate the logical reasons behind it.

Ideally, you will go into this conversation with some amount of technical skill under your belt. You may even want to take a crash course in HTML. But even if you think that HTML stands for “HoTMaiL” and a “server” has something to do with getting your eggs Benedict before they get cold, you can still develop a good rapport with your IT department if you follow this simple rule:

That's right you need to be very honest about what you know and don't know. Express your needs, and let them do their jobs by telling you the right way to get things done. Bringing IT on board as a partner rather than a servant in SEO can make all the difference in your ongoing success.

Of course, you may not want all the information that IT is prepared to share with you. If your eyes glaze over at the first mention of “meta refresh,” don't just stand there feeling miserable and trying to nod convincingly. Keep the focus on the overall goals: You need something done.

Is it possible or not? If not, what alternatives are available?

There is a give-and-take in play here. If you ask for a layperson's explanation and genuinely try to understand, you might learn something about the way your site is structured that will help you and Your SEO Plan. If you explain your SEO needs clearly, avoiding marketing jargon, your IT team will come to understand your SEO needs better and be more helpful to you in the long run.

A word of caution: If you are lucky enough to get your IT department extremely enthusiastic about SEO, you may find some ideas coming your way that fall into the realm of “black hat.” We once had a meeting with a large, multidepartmental team. We had just finished going through a point-by-point explanation of the SEO plan we had developed for their site when we saw a man in the back seem to get very excited. His hand shot up, and he said, “Wouldn't it be even better if we just used the web server to show the search engine robots one thing but the site visitors would see the regular page?” Yep, he had just “thought up” the concept of cloaking. Of course, his intentions were honorable; he was using his technical knowledge in a way that he thought would benefit the company. As SEO team leader, be prepared to communicate the things that will get your site into trouble and find common ground with those who proclaim to be SEO know-it-alls.

Some of those techie qualities that may seem, at first, like challenges might ultimately work to the advantage of your SEO campaign. For example, IT folks are more likely than other departments to actually follow specifications. That means that if you all sit down and agree on a file-naming convention, you can probably count on IT to carry the torch. Second, your IT department is likely to be very process oriented. Although you may find it frustrating to wait three months for a simple HTML change, at least you can trust that the task will be handled and documented in an orderly fashion. And third, what some may call “geekiness,” others recognize as an enthusiasm for learning new things and lots of energy for the challenges that SEO will bring.