Me and My SEO

joeschaefer — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:42:34 +0000

Through an Internet marketing recipe of mixing the undercurrents of culture, thought and attitudes with eclectic wrodsmith research, planned and executed design strategies, art and science-infused forward thinking, philosophy, more research and a nascent finger on technology trends, SEO, as far as I can see, is a marketing necessity for many businesses.Did I forget to mention dumplings?You see, my limited knowledge of dumplings only goes as far as ‘I know I like to eat ‘em’. If you think about it, dumplings come in all shapes and sizes and are prepared differently and taste differently. Much like the different approaches to optimizing a site. To go even further, the breakdown of the elements of a site are like that too. For example, I was looking at a site that I am going to drive targeted traffic to and found myself once again having to become somewhat of an expert on the ‘dumplings’ within the site. The ‘dumplings’ I speak of are the individual pieces of information. Each one has a different size, shape and flavor. Damn, this is a pretty cool job. [I got to compare my love for tastey dumplings to chunks of info right there...stuff like that is cool for me]. Now that we’ve got some of the dumpling explanation out of the way (note the graphic at the top of the page) for now, I’d like to move on. Join me?If anyone tells you that SEO is the ‘end-all’ or not flexible, they are wrong. Of course, collaboration within a marketing department as well as with the client ensures that the client’s success is the first priority. That’s a no brainer.The experience of a collective, collaborative team gives both the client and a marketing department an advantage, whereas some businesses hand over the reigns and ‘hope for the best’. Surely this isn’t a practical appraoch for a business, but it happens. Additionally, the nature of Search Engine Marketing and Optimization is such that a business needs to fully understand not only the marketing potential, but the required ongoing maintenance. At SES NY 2008, one speaker gave an example of Internet marketing that could open the eyes of many businesses who may be on the fence with SEO. The example is of a business with a website that blocked the search engines from indexing it. Risky move. Yet, the internet marketing team chose to utilize social media marketing to drive quality traffic to the site. The result was a constant blow-out of inventory. The company’s product moved so rapidly that they had a hard time keeping fresh stock. Eventually, the internet marketing team eased up on keeping active with the site’s marketing maintenance (not out of ignorance, but for other reasons not associated with keeping the business rocketing skyward). Soon the business witnessed a dramtic change in the number of customer orders–they went from a flood to a trickle.Here are some lessons to be learned by businesses or anyone interested in SEO:(a) SEO / SEM is a valuable tool for maximizing exposure and increasing sales.(b) SEO / SEM is an ongoing process.(c) Social Media Marketing is a hot ticket for driving targeted traffic to a site.Each business, small/medium/large, wants to be fruitful. The branches of business are meant to bear fruit and the addition of a knowledgable Internet marketing and design team to cultivate the land upon which they will sow the seeds of generation and regeneration is a fundamental asset.An SEO needs to focus in a business’ objectives, goals and plan to design and implement a strategy that finds success for those aspects. It is possible to have a website that ranks highly in the search engine but gets few targeted visitors. Many visitors may get to a site and leave prior to getting a convincing reason to stay. In other words, it’s not always enough to get a visitor to click a link. The idea should be for a site’s visitor to get to a site and be encouraged to stay long enough to get the ‘take action’ message. Getting them to return is a topic for another conversation.The end result should be that the company’s website engages, appeals, and has a repeat-customer effect.These 3 words are some of the basic foundations that come to mind for me as somewhat of a consumer:ENGAGE your target audienceAPPEAL ot their needs and wantsREPEAT the process in order to secure a loyal customer baseA company that wants to go the eCommerce route would benefit from a team that can handle the foundations as well as the ongoing maintenance to increase exposure, interest, curiousity and the ever-important return customer base. As the client of an SEO team your objectives arrive in a timely manner and you stay ahead of the competition.The joke goes: SEO is the only profession where the more there are, the more you need.How true. Think about it. The more guys and gals out there promoting sites and building up businesses on the Internet by getting maximum exposure only leads to increased competition between companies. However, the fast pace of the business/consumer world and all of its technology is not going to wait for everyone to get onboard. The sooner one starts the SEO/SEM process, the better.That’s my dumpling for the day.

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Me and My SEO