This week Rob Young, of Online Media Daily, did some great detective work to show Why Toilet Paper is More Important to Big Brands Than SEO.  Rob looked at 10 of the top retail brands in the country, and used some basic statistics to estimate that they each spend nearly $2 million on coffee and $1.6+ million on toilet paper each year, but nearly nothing on SEO.  With these large bills on items with no ROI, Rob then looked at the main reasons large companies often forsake SEO including, the lack of guarantees, the complexity of tracking, and clashes between IT and SEO.

Over at Search Engine Watch Ron Jones brought the standards issue back to life with his article, Do We Need Educational Standards For Learning SEO.  Ron differentiates his case for standards by calling for educational standards.  In order to properly train new employees and new entrants into the industry we need to have a common idea of what optimizing a website is.  Ron acknowledges that many issues remain in the way of standards, but still shows they are worth working towards.

There was good article this week that was posted directly to Sphinn on The Gray Area Between SEO Consulting & SEO Implementing. Derek Edmond looks at the different levels of services provided by SEO consultants. Typically problems have arisen when a consultant provides recommendations to a company that isn’t suited to carry them out.  This creates the question of the best way to implement a consultant’s recommendations.  If a consultant carries out the recommendations, it will be more expensive than if a company brings in technical workers to handle the recommendations, but might not be as quick and easy.

That is it for this week’s search marketing staffing news, check back next week for another update.