In order to build an efficient SEO automation framework you must carefully seperate value added manual tasks from reptitious automatable steps. For example, writing content on Social Networking is value added, but posting it to 23 different pligg sites and bookmarking the article at 50+ sites is not.

Manual or Automation

But determining which categories it goes into on the 23 pligg sites is an appropriate manual task. So it's not like you are just going to offshore someone to pickup the phone and say: "Dr. Newharts office, hold please."

Let's posit, for the sake of argument, that you've built a framework of CMS, user administration, content creation, database driven workflow, and iMacro automation of specific tasks. Not a small task, but you can get there stepwise, so bear with me.

What we do here is to flowchart (remember that?) our process and mark boxes as M/A - where:

• M = Manual
• A = Automatic

The trick is to NOT mark something as "M" just because you don't know how to automate it. If you can concieve of something as non-manual, odds are that a bit of sweat equity will allow you to build a tool to automate the process.

Real World Automation Example

We recently had to create a BUNCH of customer records for a system migration, fix address fields, verify zip codes, etc, etc. And by BUNCH I mean it was 200K+ items. We had done this type of work before using Mark V1.0 Humans so we had an idea of times and costs. This time we did a bit of flowcharting and what-if'ing and decided that rather than spend 3 months doing the needful with copy/paste/excel and 40 people we would build an iMacro based toolset.

The tool creation took two weeks, we temp'd a dozen folks to manage exceptions, and were done in 2 months. For half the cost and at a measured 95% accuracy rate.

That is SO NOT SEO

Well, yeah, but did you think we'd tell you our internal SEO tricks? Uh, no.

But use your imagination. Say you have 50 keywords/phrases you buy on Google. Who else buys them? How do they rank in the SERPS? How are their websites organized? What else do they own?

You can certainly figure out all that stuff manually. Or you could write an iMacro to query google, capture the ads, present them to people to decode, send iMacro to run reports on their sites, look up their IP's, etc, etc.

If you Do It More Than Once

You might consider automating. Me, personally, it's only worth getting the geeks involved if I have to do it more than twice/week. Otherwise, in my experience, it may take me more time to specify than to do.

Summary: Automate

I think if I were smarter I'd move my 'automate' bar down to the things I do once/week for more than six months. But, then, I have a fair bit of technical support. If you are a roll-your-own person, your barrier to entry might be even lower than mine.

When in doubt, automate with iMacro and capture your data in a relational database.