My viewpoint is simple - Marketing drives the strategy - your marketing department should be deciding what to optimise and the IT department or outsourced consultant works out how and reports back on progress against the strategy or target set by marketing.

Marketing is correctly defined as a strategic process that involves researching the market, deciding on a strategy, implementing it and measuring. It is most definitely not a technical function in coding, backend IT stuff, which is best left to the experts.

SEO is a critical component of any marketing strategy yet I fear some organisations still look to their IT professionals for SEO development.

A great question Ling!

It's an interesting question and I think this is more or less why the term Growth Hacker has come to prominence.

Digital marketing of all kinds has so much overlap with Web Development skills that it is sometimes cumbersome to employ a "marketing person" who then has to make a tonne of requests to the IT team in order to get anything done.

This problem can be solved in some part by choosing the right tools and platforms. Things like content management, tag management and sophisticated analytics tools, coupled with basic Web scripting and/or solid excel skills will usually allow someone not specifically employed as an IT professional to solve most of their own problems.

So I'd say that SEO strategy is definitely a marketing cost, some tactics will require IT resources, but that anyone doing online marketing these days really needs a "growth hacker" skillset unless they're in a big enough organisation that they can be responsible purely for the strategic side of things.

I do call my self as Marketer first ...

But its true that over the period an SEO learns much of tach stuff for building an understanding about how search engines crawl your website and how to deal with relevant problems to it ... Also to suggest optimization suggestion which cannot be done without good IT knowledge like think about analyzing Page Speed as that is the most important factor for ranking.

Now days SEO can be categorized for each n every department of business most importantly IT, Communication and Marketing because SEO job is now to deliver standard practices to respective departments so that they can care about relevant SEO stuff for their segment.

So SEO is integral part of an organization now, rather just grabbing higher search rankings ...

I answered this question for @SavvySME (on twitter the other day). I'll repost my thought below in more detail.

I believe that SEO has to be part of your IT Strategy. This may sound simplistic but you must structure your website or application in a manner that lets you take full advantage of SEO best practices. This means that you should be using friendly URL (e.g. yoursite.com/3-Ways-To-Beat-Competition vs yoursite.com/849201992992.html). You must also structure your content in a manner that groups logical information together (from the user's point of view).

This means categories and chunking of data/content must be applied consistently. Also, planning for errors, ensure you have common error handling so users can recover and navigate to needed content (301 error from permanently moved content should either redirect the user to the new location or give them navigation and/or a search to recover). Similarly a 404 (or page not found) should be used to direct the user back to available content or a way to contact your business. This is all IT Strategy, and needs to have a solid plan in place. It must also be revisited to ensure that new content is still following the intended plan.

Let me circle back, SEO is not only IT Strategy, but it is also Content Marketing. This means that the content you create should be aligned to the SEO IT Strategy so they can work together to create a united SEO plan. When creating content, make sure that you are using natural language and not just keyword stuffing to try to boost your ranking. The goal is to get eyes on the content (and keep them coming back, not constantly looking for new eyes). This means using language your users understand, not relying on jargon. Using catchy headlines for content does you no good if once the content is reached the users realize they were tricked into clicking on something completely unrelated. SEO should be natural and organic in your communication, so focus on good content. If you are planning all your content around SEO, take a step back and reevaluate if that will really produce the outcome you are seeking.

Which brings me to my last point, how will you know if your SEO strategy from an IT and/or Marketing perspective is working? You must measure it. Your IT strategy needs to include analytics and metrics that are actionable so that marketing can tweak or double down on their efforts based on how the users are engaging with the content. Remember that IT and Marketing need to work together to make a winning SEO strategy. Ensure both grounds understand the needs of one another and revisit on a predetermined basis.

I have a different view on what an IT strategy should contain. IT strategy is a high level, global/infrastructure based document. Our strategy reports usually look something like this:

current status of:

• Physical or virtual servers - hardware, operating system software and productivity software
• physical desktop environment - hardware, operating system software and productivity software
• Backup, BC and DR - what's in place, when it was tested, whether it works, how much the backed up data has grown by
• Security and Antivirus - stopped and detected threats, areas where protection is identified to be deficient
• Best practice - whether the infrastructure adheres
• Capacity - whether the infrastructure was able to cope
• Business - whether it grew, how much it grew by, if it was in line with our previous expectations
• Regular incident (something is broken) request (you need something done) or training (your staff need to know how to do something) occurances

Then we add whether any of those things might be aging and need to be replaced or upgraded in the next 12 months, suggestions for capacity improvement or best practice improvements, or staff training opportunities. We then determine with business what they expect growth to be, where they identify failings in the IT infrastructure and ways we can provide better value to business.

The strategy report doesn't say, for isntance "we propose a new server with X Y &Z componentry" - that's not strategic. It says "we propose replacing Server1 with a new, 'performance' server in Q3 to cope with growth" or "based on current data growth, we expect your backups to exceed available storage space by X, would recommend increasing backup space prior to Y, to prevent impact to your backups"

To say that how a website is structured, including things like 301s and 404s, shouldn't form part of a high level IT strategy. It's part of a Website design strategy, sure. But IT is more than just your website. You should definitely have a strategy for your internet presence, but it's not your IT strategy. It could form part of your IT strategy, but only in terms of capacity and availability of the web presence, not the actual design.

I think it is a balanced combination of both IT and Marketing. You need to know and understand your market to know how to best meet their needs - marketing. The nuances of technical stuff to enable finding of the solutions for those needs on search engines is (IT). They need to work together always.

Wow, very good question. I believe SEO is a marketing issue and not an IT issue. Main reason is, IT is responsible for the website however the content should be managed by the marketing department.

IT should not be tasked with having to post articles and content, they should be responsible for maintaining the code behind the website to ensure the load speed is as fast as possible and improving site functions.

I am a strong believer in treating departments as separate businesses. If you need to build a website your marketing department and IT department should have a meeting. Both department create the project plan and go over what is required.

In this case, the marketing department is the client and the IT department is the consultant/service provider.

Sure some of their requirements will be to ensure the site is setup to be SEO friendly however the content isn't an IT issue, it is a marketing issue. IT should not be spending time writing articles on your products and focusing time on trying to come up with the best poster design. That is a marketing issue.

The file size and dimensions of the poster is all the IT department need to worry about. IT should consult with the Marketing department on the most efficient poster size, marketing will then design the poster and ensure it meets IT recommendations.

Both departments are specialists in their area, so let them do what they do best and don't try and add new tasks they should have to worry about. Treating your departments like individual business units will help things run smoother. Departments that work together on projects should always have the Client/Consultant relationship. Once the project is over the website maintenance is completed by IT and the SEO, SEM, content and any other marketing material is managed by the marketing department.

So, short answer. SEO is a Marketing department specialty. Website development is an IT specialty. Your website is a project both departments work on with a Client/Consultant relationship. IT will know the best way to develop the site for speed and efficiency. Marketing will know what products will attract the most traffic to your site and how those products should be promoted.

Marketing (nothing to do with IT)

Yes, I think SEO should be a part of marketing not a part of IT. But it's not necessary an SEO Expert can be a marketing professional.