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SEO and Marketing Articles |
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SEO and
marketing
There is a
considerable sized body of practitioners of SEO who see search
engines as just another visitor to a site, and try to make the site
as accessible to those visitors as to any other who would come to
the pages. They often see the white hat/black hat dichotomy
mentioned above as a
false dilemma. The focus of their work
is not primarily to rank the highest for certain terms in search
engines, but rather to help site owners fulfill the business
objectives of their sites. Indeed, ranking well for a few terms
among the many possibilities does not guarantee more sales. A
successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search
results to pages, but it also may involve the use of paid
advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality
web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that
may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites,
setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their
successes, and making sites accessible and usable.
SEOs may work
in-house for an organization, or as consultants, and search engine
optimization may be only part of their daily functions. Often their
education of how search engines function comes from interacting and
discussing the topics on forums, through blogs, at popular
conferences and seminars, and by experimentation on their own sites.
There are few college courses that cover online marketing from an
ecommerce perspective that can keep up with the changes that the web
sees on a daily basis.
SEO, as a
marketing strategy, can often generate a good return. However, as
the search engines are not paid for the traffic they send from
organic search, the algorithms used can and do change, there are no
guarantees of success, either in the short or long term. Due to this
lack of guarantees and certainty, SEO is often compared to
traditional Public Relations (PR), with PPC advertising closer to
traditional advertising. Increased visitors is analogous to
increased foot traffic in retail advertising. Increased traffic may
be detrimental to success if the site is not prepared to handle the
traffic or visitors are generally dissatisfied with what they find.
In either case increased traffic does not guarantee increased sales
or success.
While
endeavoring to meet the guidelines posted by search engines can help
build a solid foundation for success on the web, such efforts are
only a start. SEO is potentially more effective when combined with a
larger marketing campaign strategy. Despite SEO potential to respond
to the latest changes in market trends, SEO alone is reactively
following market trends instead of pro-actively leading market
trends. Many see search engine marketing as a larger umbrella under
which search engine optimization fits, but it's possible that many
who focused primarily on SEO in the past are incorporating more and
more marketing ideas into their efforts, including public relations
strategy and implementation, online display media buying, web site
transition SEO, web trends data analysis, HTML E-mail campaigns, and
business blog consulting making SEO firms more like an ad agency.
In addition,
whilst SEO can be considered a marketing tactic unto itself, it's
often considered (in the view of industry experts) to be a single
part of a greater whole.Marketing through other methods, such as
viral, pay-per-click, new media marketing and other related means is
by no means irrelevant, and indeed, can be crucial to maintaining a
strong search engine rank. The part of SEO that simply insures
content relevancy and attracts inbound link activity may be enhanced
through broad target marketing methods such as print, broadcast and
out-of-home advertising as well. |