IT consulting: Outsourcing seems to apply strongly to SEO consultants as the work seems to be very good right now. There is no doubt that times were hard for a couple of years as everyone pulled back and stopped sending work to outside consultants and kept work in-house instead.

During the lean times, I got several gigs training in-house guys to do SEO for their company. What I found was that those employees were expected to take on the SEO work while increasing their overall work-load. Most in-house IT guys are not only bored stiff with SEO, they want to automate it all. While I’ve been able to tell some with good web site structure and design how to automate dynamic site SEO, for most it isn’t so easy.

But now I’m seeing companies hire extra programmers to major overhauls of their web sites based on my SEO recommendations PLUS hiring me to consult on more extensive detail work like link development, press release optimization and distribution and shopping site data feeds. This means the in-house guys are doing the tech work while I do more high-level stuff.

I’m still very happy to do in-house SEO training sessions and follow-up consulting on problem areas. And it appears that there’s lots of that work available too. Good deal.