websense

Heading out for SES San Jose Monday morning.

SES is usually a great show for us. Lots of traffic, of course, and the networking and parties are always a good time.

The search industry is going through a lot of changes, acquisitions and companies changing hands, so there should be lots of news coming out of this show.

Of course, we’re looking forward to catching up with John Marshall to learn more about Market Motive and what they’ll be up to.

As we did with SMX Advanced, we’ll post a bit about the show, the sessions and what’s happening while we’re there.

With all of the bantering back and forth Phil and I have had regarding web design/development RFP’s, I thought it might make sense to provide some ideas with regard to what you should expect in response to your RFP.

As you could tell in my initial post on Web Development RFPs, I’m not a huge fan for many reasons. One of the main reasons though, is that people are constantly asking for either outdated technology, or things that don’t exist. Phil, however, makes some great points about how to use them, and how to approach them the right way, in his post that can be found here.

So, with all of that said; if you do take Phil’s advice and put out a quality Web Development RFP, I ask you to do one thing when you receive responses. Be open to variation to what you asked for. Don’t look for an apples to apples comparison to your original document. Any Web Development Company that will serve your needs well, will take time to follow up with you and ask your permission to vary from/improve what you asked for.

We are dealing with this in one instance now. We received and RFP from a local organization. They have hired an outsourcing consulting firm to help them through the RFP/vendor selection process, which is all well and good. However, according to their RFP, they would like a site that both has a content management system and supports Microsoft Front Page. In addition, they specifically requested a Microsoft Access database. I won’t go into the reasons that these are all very bad ideas, I’ll do that in another post at a later time. My point is, that if we simply took that RFP, responded to it saying “sure, we can do that”, we would be doing a huge disservice to the client.

So, when you put out your RFP, be open minded. If you’re lucky, you’ll get some responses that involve personal follow up and some improvements on what you asked for. After all, aren’t you looking for someone to do a better job than you could do yourself?

Obviously, SEO is becoming more mainstream. Even the average small business knows that SEO exists and it’s something they need to consider. So, now that we know it’s something we have to consider, many clients are asking us “how much should I budget for SEO next year”. Talk about an impossible question to answer off the cuff. At least it’s difficult to answer honestly, off the cuff.

There is so much to consider when budgeting for search engine optimization, that doing so without at least minimal research is just foolish. Before we can provide fair and accurate investment numbers, we have to have information on at least the following things. Again, these are the minimums:

• Current rankings
• Site architecture (there are several things we check for that may impact ability to rank)
• Is it fully indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN?
• Keywords you believe you should rank for
• Log file info (basic stats including search engine referral rate, and referring keywords, etc.)

This information will give us the bare minimum to take a cursory look at your site and your industry in the search market. With that, we should be able to provide ranges with regard to what you should budget for an SEO campaign.

So, the gist of this is, don’t just pick a random number out of the air and insert it into your budget. If you call a professional SEO company and they answer you in 10 minutes or less, that’s likely what they are doing, so you might as well do it yourself. Quality SEO is likely to be expensive, and without the basic research I mentioned above, you’re really just guessing.

So, take a little time, do a little research to set an appropriate SEO budget. You might even have to spend a little money to pull that research together, but by paying for the research, you are only selecting a company to give you information. You shouldn’t have to commit your SEO campaign to them. It’ll be time and money well spent, if you do it. Your search engine optimization efforts will have much greater chances of success.

By the way, SEO should come from a marketing budget, not an IT budget!

John Marshall sent out an email this afternoon announcing his new venture, Market Motive. We’ve obviously been unabashed fans of John and his product ClickTracks for years, so when he announced that he was moving on, we were very curious to see what he’d do next.

In teaming up wiht Avinash Kaushik and Michael Stebbins, he’s certainly made a great effort to get together with some of the most respected names in the industry.

It looks like they want to both train people within the industry on web analytics, as well as serve the actual market to some degree. It’ll be interesting to see if they can pull off both. It seems to me that those they will be training will feel a bit of a conflict of interest, but who knows.

When the product is available, we’ll be sure to be on the subscriber list though and let you know what we think.