What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization seems at times to be suffering from a multiple personality disorder. On one hand it's a set of technical skills for research, analysis and even coding. On the other you must morph into a wordsmith capable of not only crafting technically targeted prose but being engaging for the viewer as well. If that weren't enough, these days you must be pro-active. Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out and get it. We are in the age of link building my friends.
Once upon a time it was merely optimizing on page factors such as Title tags site structures and keyword density. In short, getting the site ready for the 'Bots' "" (resistance is futile). These days you have to be a well rounded marketer that can create awareness, network and create value in the website to increase organic linking opportunities and so much more.
Areas of Operation; The SEO activities one performs will cover a wide spectrum of duties including optimization and maintenance of design, HTML changes, content layout and external efforts related to link building, promotion and even research and analysis, monitoring and content creation.
Important tasks of the SEO practitioner
- Set objectives and budgets
- Clarify the business model
- Domain name recommendations
- Page names and file/directory names
- Deciding Page titles, headers, sub-headers
- Keyword Research and analysis
- Content Optimization
- Internal linking structure development
- Working with meta tags
- 301 Redirects & robots.txt files
- Monitoring site and term rankings
- Monitoring site indexation
- Creating strategies increasing the Link Profile
- Monitoring latest Search industry news
Just like fixing your house or learning to bake"¦. Being good at SEO is not an over-night gig. Be prepared to spend many more hours learning about Search engines and SEO. Far more than I can possibly impart to you here. I have to keep my eyes open at all times for new updates and news in the search world, changing or adapting my knowledge base and strategies as needed.
What to expect
You could think of SEO as a 'controlled organic' marketing campaign. I say that because it is a controlled marketing plan that at the same time is targeting an 'organic' medium. Paid advertising it is a known entity as far as where it is published and potential viewing audience. SEO is directly or indirectly seeking to manipulate the 'organic' results served to search engine visitors. The SEO portion of your online marketing campaign seeks to bring traffic "" plain and simple.
It does not address conversions. Conversions are the eventual action taken by the user, be it a sale, subscription, lead generation or other action. Where SEO does come into play is in that the more targeted the campaign, the more targeted the visitor and higher the likelihood of a higher conversion rate.
Originally posted 2007-02-15 02:45:23.
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