Search Engine Optimization sure seems to be a controversial topic. It’s Easy. It’s hard. It’s dead. It’s alive. It's BS. It's Real. It should be done in-house. It should be outsourced. All that plus hundreds of blog posts every day, thousands of forum messages every hour, and a conference just about every week.

But who really understands this somewhat obscure art and science? Do the marketing VPs or online marketing directors who decide to allocate budgets and resources?

Apparently not. How else can you explain the fact that paid search gets 8X the budget allocation of organic search, and yet generates only about one quarter of the clicks?

And within those organizations that do make the decision to invest in organic optimization, do the insiders that need to support the execution of an SEO initiative know how it works and why it’s important?

Certainly not in my experience or that of the other professional SEO’s I recently talked to about this topic. In fact, just about everyone you’d need to assist in search optimization is pretty likely to work against it. Consider the following profiles - caricatures to be sure - but not far off the mark in my experience.

• Marketing Manager – Generally supports SEO or the project wouldn’t get started, but usually knows next-to-nothing about what it really entails in terms of the breadth and depth of technical, content, and design changes to the website that will be requested or required. When the magnitude of these change requests appear, they often focus on negotiating down to what’s feasible given the internal politics instead of managing the politics to get the necessary changes done. In the end, they get a sub-optimal result – hoping they can somehow get 80% of the benefit from the 20% of the changes that made it through. Of course they won’t.

• Web Developers– Doesn’t know much (or anything) about search optimization, doesn’t really care, and sees all the SEO requests as changes to what they’re planning or the ways they’re used to building site/pages. Frequently have an easy-going ‘I’ll do whatever they want me to’ attitude going in but as development moves along somehow the SEO requests often get shaved in order to ‘make the schedule’. In other words, they were all seen as ‘nice to have’ requests and not ‘must have’ requests.

• Product Managers / Merchandising Managers – This one is the most surprising. You would expect these folks to be naturally included to present clear and complete information about their products. They’ve been limited picture-price-paragraph in catalogs and brochures for years that suddenly in a medium with free incremental space you’d expect them to go wild – extolling the virtues of their products at length. Doesn’t usually happen. More commonly see the need for deep rich content and extra work (we don’t have long descriptions or up-to-date feature lists on all these products!). Seem to think prospects will buy their goods or services just because they’re selling them. Forget SEO and better rankings, shouldn’t they want to deliver more information in pursuit of higher conversion rates and more revenue?

• Graphic designers / Web designers – While it’s almost possible to understand how web developers have made it to 2007 without any idea about the methods of SEO, how did so many people who design websites for a living make it this far without becoming at least minimally aware of this stuff? The battle here of course comes down to form over function, with ‘text’ being a four-letter word for ‘aesthetically unappealing’ and anti-aliased .gif files somehow frequently ending up the lynchpin of the designs.

• CEOs / Senior Managers – These folks shouldn’t have to know about SEO, because those functionally closer to the projects should have it covered. But since they don’t most are left to notice (or be told) that their sites don’t show up on the first page in Google for some keyword they decide is critical (like their core product name or category) and then they spring into action. Calling in the Marketing Manager (described above) they then hear a long and confusing list of reasons and finger-points as to why the site/page doesn’t rank: the developer had technical limitations due to the platform and the design that graphics and marketing wanted doesn’t index well for some reason, and the product managers are working on generating more copy, and it’s basically an intractable situation but next year they plan a site redesign and they’ll hopefully get it right then. They’re left believing that SEO is an intractable problem and with the view that paid search is at least ‘actionable and manageable’.

Herein lies the real problem with SEO.

While the potential benefits are easy to articulate (who doesn’t want high volumes of free traffic from the search engines) as a marketing discipline it has something of a branding and positioning problem and even when projects are approved and begun the real-world implementation very frequently turns into a protracted and very difficult process.

A lot of the reason is the perspectives and motivations of the players, as described above. But there’s another massive problem too.

More about that in the next post.