Image by jlori via Flickr

As the economic crisis continues, more layoffs are being announced everyday in the tech industry. Zillow (real estate) just laid off 35 people, hi5 (a social network) let go 10-15, Adbrite (advertising online) dropped 40, and even eBay downsized 1500 peeps.

Yet i still see many notices for in-house SEO jobs. Why? Most companies do not need someone on staff to handle SEO or SEM. Most of the work is in the first two months and after that it tends to be monitoring the rankings, meta tags and ad campaigns.

Look at all the advantages of hiring a 1099 contractor. The company does not need to pay any benefits; the person works from home so they are saving gas and not polluting; the rate can be by the hour or a fixed number of hours rather then by year; the list goes on and on.

Someone needs to clue in these folks that in-house is no longer the way to go for search engine optimization.