In the world of Organic Marketing, there are 2 styles of engagement.  The primary and more typical style is a “hands-on” approach where Organic Marketers (often 3rd party companies) actively engage in every element of an optimization campaign.  This style is more of an organizational ‘line’ function with measurable contributions and results.  The “hands-on” approach requires at least a moderate level of site access and makes the assumption that website architecture is search engine friendly.  But these two requirements are rarely the case for large corporate websites where complex document management systems are used and 3rd party access is nearly impossible for security reasons.  E-commerce environments (specialized document management systems) are equally problematic for similar reasons.  In these cases, Organic Marketing companies offer consulting services for marketing and IT personnel.  In a consulting capacity, Organic Marketers function more in a ‘staff’ role.

Consulting Style

The consulting style of Organic Marketing is fundamentally different because the consultant must first conduct a site-wide technical discovery.  Then, based on this discovery work, inform the web manager of the technical obstacles and possible remedies.

The first possible obstacle is site architecture.  Large corporate sites with content management systems and e-commerce environments often employ dynamic web pages.  Links to these pages often pass multiple variables in their URLs that can cause the search engine spider to fail.  Session tracking through URL session IDs is another condition that causes spider errors.  Both these conditions can significantly limit the success of any optimization effort.

The second obstacle is more common to e-commerce sites.  Unless the e-store is selling proprietary products, product descriptions are likely to be the same as the suppliers approved descriptions.  These descriptions are proliferated throughout the Internet.  Google, in particular, is penalizing web pages and websites (depending on the percent of ‘near duplicate’ content found across the site).  In most cases, e-commerce store pages are actively ‘neutered’ by Google.  In these cases, a ‘near duplicate” content test must be conducted to establish the degree to which duplicate content may be a threat.

Sloppy html code can also be a significant issue.  Dynamic website pages are generated from server scripts (typically .asp, .php, .net, or .cgi).  These server scripts ‘build’ HTML pages on demand.  The HTML code that is produced may not conform to HTML standards.  They may show well in a browser, but they may not spider well and search engine spiders may error as they crawl these pages.

Lastly, administrative interfaces for content management systems may not permit the easy addition of body content or modifications to meta tags at the page level.  Although most newer e-commerce environments do allow users to change each page’s meta tags, many of the older designs do not.  And limiting the addition of unique body content beyond that of a product description may limit success.

Deep Technical Analysis

Therefore, a site must be examined in detail.  This discovery work should cover items like:

• Redirecting Domains
• Internal Link Structure
• “Home” page links
• URL structure
• Spider navigation
• HTTP header check
• HTML validation check
• Page modification capability
• Duplicate or ‘Near-Duplicate’ content check

Different Roles

At this point, the role of the consulting Organic Marketer shifts from technical discovery to trainer/teacher.  The consultant needs to properly articulate the technical obstacles that currently prevail and possible remedies.  Based on this information, website managers can make informed decisions which enables the consultant to develop a comprehensive Action Plan. 
In many cases, the Action Plan must include a commitment to change or modify the current website design so that the site may become more ‘search engine friendly’ and allow for optimization enhancements.  This is perhaps the most significant and problematic step as such a commitment to change may be politically charged.  If for no other reason, the web staff must be brought into these discussions early in the consulting process.

The 3rd role of the Organic Marketing consultant is project management.  This role not only includes monitoring the tactical implementation of Action Plan items, but also the reporting of ranking progress and competitive conditions.  Reporting is conducted monthly through a combination of written reports and phone consults.  

The 4th and final role of the Organic Marketing consultant is to implement ‘passive’ optimization activities that may be recommended or included in a comprehensive Action Plan.  Passive optimization activities do not require direct access to a website.  Rather they are optimization services that can be performed on behalf of a website manager.  

Passive activities may include:

• Premium Directory Submissions
• Article Creation and Submission
• Text Link purchases
• Google Sitemap creation

Conclusion

In the end, a consulting engagement is more intensive than a traditional ‘hands-on’ campaign.  The ‘hands-on’ approach assumes that the website does not contain technical obstacles that an Organic Marketer cannot control or remedy.  If hidden technical issues prevail, a ‘hands-on’ optimization campaign is likely to fail.  A consulting engagement does not make the same assumptions and conducts in-depth discovery.  Even though the consultant does not conduct active (on-page) optimization enhancements himself, the added burden of increased communication, reporting, training and review of enhancements more than makes up for the time had he done them himself.

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