Posted by: Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Manager, HP.com

I just received the Summer edition of Search Marketing Standard magazine (which I love because it’s hard copy – thank you!) and was flipping through the pages when I stumbled across a quick article by Tom Dahm on SEO Standards: Is Now the Right Time? 

From Tom’s article there are both arguments for SEO standards and against. I agree that some standards would be nice if only to have something or someone official backing up what I tell my colleagues at HP every day. I’m often faced with commenting that it’s an “industry best practice” which, frankly, just sounds weak a lot of the time.

I can see where it might be challenging to agree on some standards but if you have the right people on the standards board I think many SEO best practices could be wildly agreed upon and put into a standard format for all to reference – again, if only to provide another resource that says “yeah, this is a good tactic that is acceptable or encouraged by the engines”. And just because there are standards, does not mean everyone must or will abide by them (or even read them). Take the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example – how many web sites adhere 100% to what the W3C recommend? But I think most would agree that it’s a good resource in the industry. 

Working as an in-house SEO requires a lot of justification for things that we SEOs know need to be done. But making the case for certain SEO tactics or strategies to the rest of the organization, whether it be IT or marketing, is often difficult as you’re usually asking them to take your word for it. It’s hard enough that I can’t tell you exactly what the cost benefit of adding a site map to the site is but when I can’t even reference a body that is deemed to be “the source” it’s even more challenging. Sure, I can say my agency said so but we all know how well that goes over in an industry that, unfortunately, may have a tarnished reputation in the eyes of some thanks to some agencies that either don’t know what they’re doing or are black hat.

Whether or not the industry will ever come together and decide to build some common best practices into standards, I agree that companies, at least large companies, need SEO Standards.  When I started my SEO job, setting SEO web standards was one of the first tasks I set out to do in order to develop a solid program. 

The HP.com SEO web standards (which are part of a broader web standards guide) are available to all our developers and internally so that anyone creating content or developing sites for HP.com can reference them and ensure they are abiding by what HP considers SEO best practices.  The standards aren’t just a rules guide either. Every SEO standard we have in place starts with education about what the standard is and why it’s important for SEO. Then we document the best practices to employ. We don’t tell anyone how many keywords to use on a page but we can give great guidance for which an otherwise SEO novice may not have any idea.

One more really important reason for having internal SEO standards for your company is due to the potential of black hats or misinformed agencies making their way in to sell SEO to someone who isn’t knowledgeable enough to ask the right questions or challenge some of the theories or practices (especially when it comes to “automated SEO” – please.). While we have agencies of record for search, I’m always hearing about this or that agency coming in and giving this great pitch about SEO and how we need to do what they said right now!

That’s when standards come in handy so we can clearly document what is and is not acceptable on HP.com.  

So the debate goes on – SEO industry standards or not. But SEO standards for large companies are a must!