Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

“Jill-of-all-trades” at Tachyon Publications

(Continued)

This situation created some fairly serious hiccups along the way. Recently, Tachyon had to abandon

two website redesigns because they did not meet the company’s needs.“Neither version was

based on a marketing plan,or by a website designer, which, I am happy to say,the third (and

hopefully final) version will be,”says Jill.

This struggle to redesign the site helped Tachyon recognize that it was time to make a change.The

company is now building a more cohesive team to improve its Web presence. Jill says,“It took me

a couple of years to convince my boss to hire a web designer,”but eventually he did hire a part-

timer. And Tachyon is now using an on-call marketing consultant who, according to Jill,“responds

to our cries for help with amazing rapidity.”Even though she’s not a marketing expert—yet—Jill

is on the right track, and she’s got a little help when she needs it.

It’s a familiar scenario: In trying to conserve money, a small company can actually waste both

money and time when web presence is not given the expertise it requires. It’s worth the invest-

ment to identify weak spots and look for creative, but not necessarily pricey, solutions to get the

right people on board.

Jill says,“I’ve always wanted our site to be full of great content, easy to find and navigate, and

visually appealing. I think we’re getting there.”We say, now that you have the resources available

for a well-run SEO campaign, you’re bound to get there faster!

IT, Webmasters, and Programmers

Whether it’s an IT department of 60 or a single programmer hiding out in the server

closet, your SEO campaign is going to need a

lot

of help from your company’s techni-

cal 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 mindset a little more often than

usual.

At a minimum, you will need IT to help with edits to website content, conver-

sion tracking, server settings, programming standards, and the

robots.txt

file.

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