1. contract out their SEO to a reputable internet marketing agency?

2. hire an SEO expert to work in-house? Or

3. dump the job on someone already working in the IT department and let him be in charge of his own on-the-job training?

The most important thing these companies need to determine is whether or not they can get in-house results that will match those provided by experts in from outside internet marketing agency. If you are in this conundrum now, you will likely find that it is possible to get outstanding results from an in-house SEO expert—but those results will cost you.

Most SEO experts already know that giving the SEO task to someone who already works in house is the least effective of the above options. While some of these in-house IT folks do a bang-up job with SEO, most of them do it halfheartedly, if at all. The greatest risk in giving the job to an in-house IT person is that he or she may actually do more harm than good by using tactics that will put your company at risk of being penalized. They may even cause your site to be removed from search engine indexes altogether. SEO experts who are hired after the in-house IT person has given it a shot say that the bulk of the work lies in actually “undoing” what the in-house person did. In other words, they have to take everything apart completely and then put it back together again. Not only have that, but they frequently had to petition search engines to remove penalties incurred by the in-house “expert.”

Now that we know that giving the job to someone who already works in house is not the optimal solution, the question becomes whether to hire an expert into your business or whether to outsource the work to an internet marketing agency.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization reports that hiring an employee with previous SEO experience can be quite costly. For potential employees with more than five years of SEO experience you will probably pay between $100,000 and $200,000. For those with less than five years of experience the price drops to between $60,000 and $100,000. If they don't help you understand anything else about SEO, these numbers should help you understand just how valuable a good SEO expert is to your company and how detrimental it could be to your company to give the job to an in-house employee with no previous experience in SEO.

On the other hand, consider the advantages of outsourcing your SEO to a reputable company. Most SEO companies will have more than five years of total experience in the field and will easily cost you less than $60,000. A good SEO company also has the advantage of having worked on many, many websites, which will benefit you greatly. Someone you hire to work in-house probably won't have more than five or six websites under his or her belt.

Of course, there are some advantages to hiring an in-house SEO expert. An SEO company isn't going to go out of business if it doesn't get the job done, but an in-house SEO expert will feel the pressure of making sure that your website performs quickly. If an in-house person needs to speak to a number of executives at one time about SEO objectives he can do so almost immediately. It may take more time for an outsourced SEO expert to find the time to meet with everyone.

While hiring an in-house person may be a good way to meet your company's SEO needs, an SEO expert or internet marketing agency can meet the same goals at a fraction of the cost. Even if you do choose to hire an in-house expert, remember that outsourcing is always an option.