Do i need a full time seo employee?

I need seo done for 1 site that’s still new. It’s a niche listings/ecommerce site.

And i need to make a hiring decision for this - whether there’s a need for a full time employee dedicated to seo or is part time or a contract sufficient?

Here’s some info and assumptions :

1)The site’s dynamic - so perhaps all ON PAGE SEO - keyword research, page title, meta tags <hx> etc. could be built in programatically and is perhaps ONE TIME EFFORT.

2)Most(perhaps not all) ON PAGE SEO is taken care at the start or initially so doesn’t need much time devotion later.

3)Most ON PAGE SEO for a DYNAMIC site is a programmer’s job(as probably a seo employee doesn’t understand programming) with some assistance from a seo employee for KEYWORD RESEARCH etc. So once built into the software, it DOESN’T NEED much effort on part of the seo employee in the later stages.

4)OFF PAGE SEO IS really where the seo employee would really spend most of his/her time - like build some links, write articles/blogs, directory submissions etc.

So considering that there’s just 1 site and that most effort for the seo employee is concenterated on OFF PAGE SEO, do i really need to hire someone Full Time?

You’re most welcome to add your own views and perspectives to this. It might help someone else as well in the future in their hiring decision.

In my prespective, an SEO for just one website seems exaustive. SEO is hard, and confusing at most times, but it is entirely possible. I know very little about being succeessful on SEO, (my website has 2 views a day) but if you build it…The links will come to you…Eventually…

You do not need a dedicated employee for any SEO work…really you should be careful of hiring anyone who claims to be a “professional SEO” person—whatever their title is. At most they spent 5 minutes reading some article about the subject and the claim to be experts. Most of them post replies to this very section of Sitepoint.

Creating a search engine friendly page is actually very easy. Make it people friendly, tailor it for humans and the machines will follow. DO NOT tailor it for machines, they won’t buy a darn thing from you.

Agree logic_earth … perhaps even i know better than some of these seo experts as i’ve done a bit of seo before for my own sites, however i’m looking for someone who can do it regularly as i don’t have much time myself for this… Unfortunately most seo experts do not follow common sense approach … what catches eyes of the people catches the search engine’s eyes too…

Under which category would you put content creation? Would it fall under off-page, or on-page? Yes, your site needs to be dynamic to take advantage of the freshness factor that the search engines (particularly Google) and the readers are looking for. To answer your question, it would depend on how much time you’ll be able to dedicate for your site’s SEO. You can do it yourself; it’s not as complicated as it seems. You can read a lot of stuff from the people here in this forum (except from those who claim to be experts), and some of the big names in the world of SEO.

Its better to get SEO for your site done by the experts instead of getting one inhouse. There are many good seo services company out there which can help you with it.

The problem for small a business is that the big companies charge a fortune and you don’t know if you really get your moneys worth. We made the mistake of hiring a company in the Philippines for SEO and they submitted spam everywhere. Now we are in the learning stage of trying to do the SEO ourselves inhouse.

[font=verdana]There may be “many” good ones, but there are “many, many more” who are not – either through incompetence (ie they don’t realise that what they are doing is wrong) or negligence/fraud (ie they do know that what they’re doing is wrong but they just don’t care). Either way, the web is full of stories of people who have engaged SEO firms in good faith, and had nothing but bills and trouble as a result.

What many/most SEO firms do is “link building”, which is usually a politer way of saying “spamming”.[/font]

Stevie and backcarebeds agree with both of you… if i do end up hiring someone it’s going to need some diligence or perhaps i’m better off outsourcing individual tasks…

You should have an SEO expert employee to do some SEO stuff for your site. You must consider the fact that we have different techniques used in promoting a site. I disagree with backcarebeds, I think you have just picked the wrong ones. Gaining site traffic is not an easy job, it requires a skill and different techniques. And every one of us hold a different skill and techniques and for backcarebreds the next time you pick your employee you must know first how dedicated they are to their work.

There are good and bad in every field. SEO is not an exception. Genuine SEO expert defenitely increases site ranking and search results. If the site owner has time and interest to do SEO for his own, then it is fine otherwise you have to hire a SEO exper or company for your site. Genuine SEO expert should be result oriented. If the content of the page, title, meta keywords, meta desc, h1 hearder, alt tag, anchor text are correct for the page, genuine SEO expert definetely increases ranking in search result.

That is just one website, you can actually do it yourself.

But, of course, you might be busy with some other important things and so, if that is the case, you will benefit a lot if you hire a full time employee. Just be sure to find the right person to do the job.

Yes it is ongoing and long term work to gain best ROI.

Yes, you must have a fulltime SEO specialist for your site in order to work for your site. Because it serve as an investment of maintaining excellent marketing for your site as well as eeping the rank of your site in every target keyword searches.

this question depends upon your goal and the competition in your field! If they are big and tough,yes You need a full time SEO employee!!

Its up to you that if you had time and sufficient knowledge of SEO, then do it yourself otherwise hire a dedicated resources.

There’s a huge difference between hiring a legit SEO firm to consult or perhaps even work full time on your project vs. hiring someone to do some link building for you. You’re basically saying that most on page SEO is a programming job, which couldn’t be further from the truth. If you tell a programmer to design a site, he might make it completely search engine unfriendly. On the other hand, if you know how to properly optimize a website for search engines and can lay out the plan for the programmer, then you’re doing the On Page SEO. However on page SEO isn’t just about keyword research, or putting a H1 tag here or there. It’s also not about doing ti once and leaving it alone. You need to constantly tweak your on page SEO if you’re in a difficult niche and balance your on page SEO with conversion rates.

Anyway, my point being is if you already know SEO and aren’t planning on hiring an expert but rather a grunt worker off of oDesk.com or something similar, then you shouldn’t hire an expert at all. Hire a grunt worker and tell them what to do. Take care of the on page SEO yourself. If you want to make sure the site is optimized for search engines, seek out a SEO consultant who has a good reputation and pay them for a couple hours of consultation. If you consult with an SEO expert for 2-3 hours and they provide you with a solid site architecture and a form to make automatically generate your title tags, meta description etc and ask them if they would recommend you target a few types of links to start out. Do NOT hire an SEO expert who says he can build you links on a monthly basis which will cost you $1000/month.

I agree with you Source Media but how do you know how that expert will work out and what methods they will use when you live on the other side of the world? We looked at his projects, got recommendations. My wife went to Manila for ten weeks to learn basic SEO from this company whilst they worked on our website and they appeared to be good. Then several months later we started to get feedback that they were heavily spamming. I am sure you are right that we just picked the wrong one but how do you know until it is too late?

Yea source m has it but you wont know anything until months later.

As you think, on-page SEO is not a one time effort. It requires changes according to time and competition. Since you mentioned it as an e-commerce,

  1. Do you think, a web programmer can structure the URLs of the dynamic pages ??
  2. Can he provide a proper search page with all SEO elements ON ??
  3. Do you keep your e-commerce portal home page always same with look+ seo factors ??
  4. How do you manipulate your content in such a way that one single content can showcase in different way in different pages (in case of products) ?
  5. Dynamic sitemap creation with all SEO elements
  6. Once you complete on-page of your website, can you guarantee that your website appear in SERP pages for all your keywords (it may short or long tail keywords)…
    I do agree that these jobs can done by a developer. However, he thinks only in developer way, but not in SEO way. We have to create a page in such a way that both users and search engines should accept your webpages.