A basic level of SEO knowledge within the software and website development departments can speed up the production process, as well if you have a well educated development team they already know a lot about how SEO affects what they do every day and can modify their efforts on an ongoing basis. A team like this will be more likely to make the right decisions when the person in charge of SEO is not immediately available.
When your able to address basic SEO knowledge within the development team, you can dramatically reduce the work for the SEO practitioner, so that when they do review your website for search engine friendliness and to create an SEP strategy, instead of spending time talking to you about Flash, JavaScript, header tags and alt text they can focus on the more advanced solutions and strategies.
A basic SEO knowledge is a very powerful and useful tool to have in both online and offline marketing. There are many companies that have failed to integrate their offline marketing efforts such as television commercials with their online marketing efforts. SEO planning in these areas can often make or break a website or product launch.
SEO knowledge at a management level is also essential for similar reasons, decisions made by management which can in turn affect the entire business, can often have a disastrous effect on SEO efforts if they are done in a vacuum. This is a common problem that even after the development teams, designers, and copywriters are trained in SEO, managers end up being the obstacle as they haven’t been briefed on the aspects of SEO that executives should and need to know.
When all the members of an organisation have a basic SEO knowledge the chances of success are exponentially greater. The SEO consultant or team can focus most of this energy on new initiatives and continuing to develop the process while the rest of your team makes good business decisions and taps the SEO specialist for on demand answers to questions.