Posted by:  Laura Dansbury, Global Hp.com On-site Search Program Manager

The last time I talked about collaboration between the 3 areas of search, I noted that the communication required between HP SEM, SEO, and On-Site search managers to prepare for a panel presentation was a learning opportunity.

Michael Martinez recognized that this idea could be extended to a formal process:

If you have more than 1 person managing any aspect of your search visibility you need to have regular meetings to see what each person is doing AND to see if they can help each other innovate, leverage resources, and improve efficiencies. If there are only 3 people handling your search visibility they should be making presentations to each other once a week, at least once a month, in a formal meeting environment. It would be good to include non-technical people in the presentations to ensure the B.S. degrees don’t show themselves.    

Michael’s insight about the need for regular meetings is spot on. Let me give an example of how we make this work. Tanya, Vicki, and I meet twice a month to catch-up on all things search.  Sometimes we have new data to share, sometimes we are just looking for help with a search puzzle, sometimes we have an idea for a new project, but it is always good to hear the opinions of someone wearing a different search hat.

The best collaborations come when more than one of us has a similar problem.  We get much better traction when 2 or 3 of us are highlighting and escalating the same issue.  We have more data to prove our case, a higher expected ROI from resolving the issue, and the power of peer pressure.  For example, how important is it to correct a syntax error on the description and title tags of a particular web section? Maybe the description tags could be considered less important from an SEO perspective because frequently the major engines choose to show a snippet from the content body rather than the description tag.  But for on-site search, we show the description tag in the search results. So it’s very important to update the description tags if there’s an error.   Together, Tanya and I can do a much better priority assessment than if we approached this issue independently from just our own focus area.