Dafydd Lewis | In house SEO

Sounds like a silly question doesn’t? No actually it doesn’t.

It’s an easy mistake to make, you’re chatting away with your webdesigner/business partner/internet management company and you say “let’s get that domain name”, “sure”, they say, “its only a few pounds/dollars I’ll do it”.

And then you forget about it, the site goes up or you shelve the idea to be addressed in the future.  Time goes by and you make a success of your internet idea or the domains you bought start to become more valuable on their own.

So the time comes that you want to make changes within the company or relations between you and your partner/designer become tense or your internet management company goes bust.  Then you realise, YOU DON’T HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR DOMAIN NAMES.  Whoever bought the domains has registered themselves as the owner (and yes, I have seen IT management companies do this as well).

As anyone who has been to court knows it is an awful, costly process and one that is best avoided and if the company you were using goes bust and they all magically bugger off, who are you going to take to court to regain control?.  Also there is no need for it.

If you can, always make sure you are the one who is down as the registrar (tell them that you’ll handle all the annoying domain stuff and register it in your name) .  If that is not an option you should have an agreement drafted by a professional, a commercial or corporate law specialist.

Don’t let it sneak up on you.

As more businesses go online and those that are online increase their efforts the problem of web management becomes evermore relevant.

The internet is steeped in myth and misinformation. This is partly because anyone can get involved and set themselves up as an “expert” and partly because of the fast moving, everchanging and highly complicated nature of the technologies involved.

The business of doing business on line is loaded with unfamiliar and potentially very expensive terms like SEO, web 2.0, ASP, JSP, PHP, Ruby, AJAX, CPM, CPC, PPC, XXS, SQL injection, Organic, usability accessibility, Linux, IIS, Blackhat, Whitehat etc etc. More familiar terms like affiliates, ROI, overheads, advertising, branding, hacking, security etc are also mentioned but how do they apply to the online environment?

What is going on? Who is doing what? What technologies are involved? Are we as competitive as we should be? What are the latest developments? How do we measure things? What can we measure? How do we know who to hire? What constitutes relevent experience?

These questions go on and on and in most companies no one is able to answer all of them. Even if there is a substantial online effort the people involved are often contained in disperate groups with poor communication and collaboration systems in place.

As the internet matures and we move further from the wild west internet of a few years ago we find that there are best practices and effective methodologies emerging. Yes the internet moves at an alarming rate so you need to kept up to date by people who know where to look. Yes there are a bewildering number of technologies available but there will be a best fit for your efforts once all your needs are taken into account. Yes there are angencies that will provide a very poor service for a great deal of money but likewise there are true professionals who provide excellent ROI.

As the web grows and becomes a more professional environment the role of the web manager is one that becomes ever more necessary.

I dream of holding documents containing the deconstructed google algorythm. All its weaknesses and vulnerablities laid bare for me, all its ranking criteria accurately described. Who doesn’t? We all conduct our own tests and draw what conclusions we can from them but they are time consuming, complicated and require investment. So imagine how my sceptisism leapt when the managing director of a company I was working with mentioned that he was friends with someone who had just been given the SEO directive documents of very large UK SEO company. A company with huge resources for research and development.

His friend had been told to never let these documents be seen by anyone else and that they held the core SEO practices of this company. Cutting edge secrets that only a privilaged few are aware of.

So, I swear that i will not copy a word of the documents and eventually I am allowed to view them on his laptop. So I open search.doc and what do I find……

Pages of algorythmic experiments and conclusions, highly controlled test sites and insider conversations? No.

A rewritten version of

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

!!!!!

So I carry on, hoping for nuggets of gold. I open Social.doc and get….a description of how social media sites work (join, make friends, comment of stuff etc) and a list of social sites.

and on and on it goes. Click.jpg is….

Project.doc is site evaluation, keyword research, competitor analysis, link evaluation, hub finding, link building (directories, social and reciprocal!) etc etc.

Now the information contained in the document was good, don’t get me wrong. Borrowed from some of the best in our business. However it does make me think about how many top SEO companies are just reading the blogs and writing it down. It seems to be the same old story.

So I get to the final document and it is their pricing document. £15,000 for all the above.

Bargain.