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In this article I will discuss the challenges of business process outsourcing and search engine optimization work in other countries. I have been outsourcing to India, the Philippines and Romania since 2005 and hopefully sharing my experiences with you will help you to better understand the pros and cons of of BPO and SEO together.
BPO Meets SEO
Just a quick overview, BPO aka business process outsourcing, which is simply the act of outsourcing work to another company instead of doing it in-house. When most people talk about BPO they are usually referring to outsourcing this work to another country. This is because American companies can save a load of money due to the fact that countries like India, The Philippines and Romania have a much lower cost of living and therefore, cheaper labor.
SEO aka search engine optimization is the act of increasing one’s search engine rankings and driving organic traffic to a website. SEO used to be a pretty straight forward, one-man job that mostly involved clean web design and optimization of tags and on-page content as the competition increased people learned that they could also increase the exposure of their site by acquiring links. It wasn’t long before people learned how to manipulate the search engine’s algorithms to make their site appear higher in the search engine results. This became known as “black-hat SEO” which means any form of SEO that is designed to trick the search engines into thinking your site is more important than it is.
SEO BPO Philippines, Romania and India
Fortunately, Google with it’s billions of dollars put a lot of time and resources to prevent these black-hat techniques from working and it is exactly that which increases the demand for outsourcing SEO. 2011 is a tough year for SEOs because Google rolled out a whole new series of algorithms to prevent people from being able to use black-hat techniques to dominate the search rankings. Black-hat isn’t completely dead but it’s a lot tougher for hacker or spammer sit in his boxers and get a website ranked on the first page of Google. I saw this coming and started taking action years ago when I realized that getting good results will increasingly take manual SEO work that requires real manpower and hours of work. The only way to do that is with a full team of professional search engine optimizers and since these guys tend to require large salaries in the States, the best option is to outsource these tasks overseas.
I now run outsourcing teams of SEOs overseas in Romania, Philippines and India. Our SEO agents work diligently, 8 hours per day performing white-hat techniques such as content creation, manual link building, managing networks of blogs, getting friendly with social media and building up Web2.0 properties. That being said, I still dabble in gray and black-hat techniques but only as a supplemental antidote to the thousands of other black-hatters out there that bend the rules. As the old saying goes, “fight fire with fire”.
In conclusion, if you are serious about getting traffic, then you should waste no more time and look into outsourcing your SEO right away. Feel free to snoop around my site here to find examples, case studies and actual results from my SEO outsourcing efforts.