I have observed over the past year there seems to be a very strange split that is occurring within the in-house SEO group. Personally working in-house for a large company with a wide variety of SEO's, I noticed that continual research and development is a dying art. Innovation is coming form old information and logic and little time is spent reading the boards/blogs and staying up to date.
Personally I spend half my day researching and staying up to date on any advancement as it could be catastrophic if you let it go. Additionally I noticed that the return to the forums only occurs when something goes wrong, the in-house folks who spend time reading and staying up to date are commonly not asking questions when changes are occurring since they are a step ahead.
Labels: in house seo, seo

- Name: Aaron Shear
- Location: San Francisco, California, United States
I have been in the search industry since the late 90’s, no not 10-20 years. My career started early in the search Day’s at Inktomi, where I supported large search portals. For example, MSN, AOL, iWon, Hotbot, CNet too name a few.
After Inktomi I became a freelance consultant. I consulted for a few of the Top SEO’s around 2002 time frame; obviously the market has changed since then. After consulting I joined a small SEO firm called SEO Inc as the CTO. At SEO Inc. I successfully optimized some of the largest clients including IGN, Sony, VEGAS.com, Beaches and Sandals Resorts to name a few.
Even though SEO Inc was a ton of fun, I still wanted the ultimate SEO challenge. I moved on as the global head of SEO for Shopping.com an eBay company. This challenge was an interesting one, how do I optimize a site with 50 million products? Every month I helped the business grow by leaps and bounds.
I am now consulting for mostly enterprise e-commerce clients.
Yes there is more too me than this profile shows, but you will just have to ask.
View my complete profile
5 Comments:
You're so right, Aaron. One of my biggest challenges is just finding the time to read the industry news, unfortunately, there's rarely time for forums.
It's tough, how do you balance your job and research? If you are in management, how do you balance so much?
You're right - research and ongoing reading are extremely important.
It is quite a challenge for those of us doing in-house SEO, particularly those of us who wear other hats in addition to the search marketing/SEO hat.
But, it's too important to ignore... one must prioritize.
I want to know how you have time to blog =). My blog has been dead ever since I went in-house.
Michael, you can still work for me. I am sure I can give you enough time for education. ;-)
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