I got this article, “So…Should We, or Shouldn’t We?“,  in my inbox.  Jill Whalen posted an article, “Don’t sweat the small stuff“, a few days ago advising SEOs not to worry about the nitty gritty details like keyword density, proper Title tags, or implementing the use of <h> tags throughout their pages.   It was followed up by Lisa Barone’s article “Sweat The Small Stuff: Search Engine Optimization Is In The Details“, which as you can imagine suggests the opposite.

This seems to tie directly to Brian’s post entitled “About.com Asleep At The Wheel“, where he found some things that About.com and their SEO team are failing to implement.

So, who’s right?

Jill has a point.  And Lisa has a point.  But the fact is that SEO is a package.  It all matters.

Look, if you are overwhelmed with the amount of work you have or sites you manage, then you can probably only afford to see the sites from 30,000 feet.  It’s the old 80/20 rule.  You probably don’t have the time to optimize each Title tag.  You probably can’t get into the code and optimize it by getting the text close to the top of the code, implemeting <h> tags, externalizing CSS and JS, and reducing code bloat.

But you know what?  I CAN.  And a lot of others can.  And we might pass you by as a result.

It’s a resource issue that you, as a manager, need to identify and resolve.  If you are a one, or two, or three man team within a huge corporation how much good do you think you can do?  If you have 100 sites to manage, how much time can you dedicate to each?  Can you be in all meetings at once to ensure all projects are in compliance with your SEO best practices?   If you have the resources you need you’ll be able to assign individuals to the 30,000 foot view, but have others getting their hands dirty in the small SEO details.  Don’t settle for 80/20.