First of all, what is a search marketing center of Excellence (COE)? It originated from IT environments specifically in the fields of product testing and quality assurance. Creating a COE is intended to create a central storage of knowledge, data and best practices that can help other divisions of the business with their goals.

The search marketing COE is very useful for small teams or even individual SEO practitioners. The benefits are just too many so this is a must for all marketers even for the smallest organizations.

Benefits of Having a Search Marketing Center of Excellence

Reduced Expenses

Search engine marketing contributes a considerable amount of revenue for organizations. A search marketing COE can help a lot in your progress. This helps create new ideas and tactics that are beneficial to your organization without having to use outside resources that cost a lot of money. This reduces cost and saves a lot of money.

Having Search Best Practices

The COE helps create good standard and best practices that can considerably boost productivity and help increase revenue. This helps maintain company standard which strengthens customer relations and prevents losing customers to competitors.

Centralized Expertise

A COE further increases knowledge on things that are related to search. This sharpens knowledge on the subject which can help in terms of SEO resulting to more traffic and revenue. Usually, the organization makes the COE team the authority when it comes to search related questions. This saves a lot of resources because there is no need to hire experts or conduct research.

In-house Training for Search Marketing

This team can be used to train other departments regarding search marketing. Again, this saves money because there is no need to tap into external resources that can be costly. Of course, success mainly depends on the other groups that contribute to search marketing. Obviously, when everyone understands each other and are knowledgeable, projects will be finished faster and the quality of work will be excellent.

Having Best Practices Documents

Although this can be a little time consuming, having documents comes with several benefits. First of all, you can easily look at these documents as a basis. Other departments can also without difficulty look at these documents for research and other purposes. Just remember that these documents should be regularly updated for changes. This guide benefits all SEO functions such as content best practices, on-page best practices, link building, and so on.

Whenever Steve Ballmer talks, we all know it is Microsoft. The Microsoft CEO, will definitely not count his words while speaking about Microsoft.

So when Steve Ballmer, was questioned by Search Engine Land Editor in Chief,  Danny Sullivan, at the Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California, on March 2, 2010 , let’s see what the CEO, Microsoft talked on Microsoft’s Bing, Windows Phone, Twitter and Google.

Let’s look at what the gentleman, who knows to play his cards right, said.

Bing!

He certainly binged on ‘Bing ‘, the Microsoft’s decision engine.

Ballmer did not deny the possibility of association with apple, just kept it slightly glanced off by mentioning, “A Bing for iPhone search deal is still possible”.

He mentioned that Windows Phone 7 series, unveiled on Feb 15^th in Barcelona, Spain, will definitely use only Bing as the Search engine. It was not made clear whether the smart-phones running windows mobile 6.x would be upgradable to the new operating system.

He also stated that,” Microsoft isn’t interested — at least for now — in releasing a Bing application for Android phones.”

Raw Twitter posts, buried in Bing, will they come up?

On Microsoft’s association with Twitter, he swerved the question by mentioning that though the partnership with Twitter is great, they are not sure about acquiring it. He said that as an independent company, Twitter has lot of value and creditability.” Would they have that same credibility with the user community, if they were captive?” he questioned back.

Has Bing been improving its offerings, in an attempt to eat away at Google’s share?

When queried about what future he sees for Bing against competition, the big wheel said, “There’s no good answer to this question. If you say ‘yes,’ you sound arrogant. If you say ‘no,’ you sound like you are happy with second place.  No one aims to be second, so the answer is ‘yes’”.

When asked whether he believed Microsoft would eventually overthrow Google in search, Mr. Ballmer said, “I don’t know how old I will be when that’ll happen”.

Looks like Mr. Ballmer admits that Google dominates the search engines.

Stirring up trouble for Google in Europe through third parties,

When Danny Sullivian confronted him on the article by the Wall street Journal on Microsoft steering third parties to push against Google in terms of antitrust issues, the suave entrepreneur handled the question with ease. He admitted that Microsoft had been in discussions with antitrust regulators over its search-engine rival being scrutinized by a number of government agencies, ranging from the Federal Trade Commission to the Department of Justice.

The CEO certainly knows to make hay while the sun shines.