Rand Fishkin says that once you know the on-site stuff, then SEO is just web marketing. You should trust that the engines will reflect how popular you are in the rankings.
Does that mean I should just go out and interact with bloggers and in social media in areas relevant to my niche and my rankings will improve?
Then what is the purpose of a big SEO company like BlueGlass? What’s so tough about the jobs of people who work there? They just tell clients “Make a blog with posts titled ‘The top 10 blah blah’, we’ll buy you some backlinks, and interact with customers in social media.” Is that it?
Or is the real SEO the blackhat stuff, what ever that is?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is just a small part of Search Engine Marketing SEM, also referred to as Internet Marketing. It is very tough to “do this right”. It is easy to do a bunch of stuff and think it will help without even knowing. That is why SEO companies like the one I own and others like BlueGlass are in business. After doing this for 11 years I have learned that it is not easy but our 11 years of experience can make our SEO and SEM work take less time than someone just starting out and we can develop an online marketing strategy per business and not just give every customer a canned approach.
Social Media Marketing is another subset of Search Engine Marketing SEM and has its purposes but it is better to develop an online marketing strategy based on the goals of the company and not just do things because they work for some business’.
Some people say that any on-page work is part of good web design, and therefore SEO only applies to off-page work.
Others take a broader view and say that on-page work that is principally to help search engines more than people also counts as SEO.
Both on-page and off-page can be white hat, black hat or indeterminate grey hat.
SEO companies have a single aim - to make money out of people gullible enough to buy their services. They rarely contribute to the benefit of the web as a whole. The only time they are likely to give any real, long-term sustainable benefits to any customers except the most clueless and inept whose sites and marketing were easy to improve.
Wow Steve, SEO and SEM is very valuable service (IF YOU DO IT RIGHT). Not all SEO companies do it right but the ones that do are worth what they charge. A lot of web development companies do not offer SEO or SEM and therefore do not code the page to comply with search engine friendly URL’s or pages. That being said. SEO is a very small part of successfully reaching the top of search engines.
I think we are getting into semantics. I am not really trying to define SEO and SEM as much as I am trying to help the original poster. Search Engine Marketing encompasses PPC Campaigns, SEO, Local Search, Linkbuilding, Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing, etc… SEO is part of a Search Engine Marketing or Internet Marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO as webmasters fondly call it, is a method to improve the reach of a website to the people who might be in need of such websites. It could be for the content, service, product, advice or just about anything that website has to offer.
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Organic SEO is normally called as White Hat SEO. But I think a huge number of link building is also considered as spamming and i will call this as Black Hat SEO.
I’d now consider that a dated opinion. The wider public is far more aware of SEO than it was a few years ago and many businesses will now solely associate SEO with the kind of spammers and con-artists we so frequently see spamming these forums with their ill-advised opinions.
Many companies now seem to be distancing themselves from the term SEO because of these people, and more often than not to the wider audience SEO is just “black hat cheating”. On that subject I hate the term “Black Hat” and “White Hat”; it’s a term stolen from hackers who have genuine repercussions for their actions, whereas SEO is just annoying spammers who largely end up getting caught.
For me SEO is largely a dying medium, being slowly taken over by the rise in multivariate testing and the requirement for content writers. We do some basic SEM work, but outside of that we now do very little.
SEO is often defined as improving the volume or quality of traffic to your website from search engines.
I don’t think making sure you build a well coded page is SEO, you should be doing that even if search engines didn’t exist because browsers show your sites to your visitors, not search engines.
SEO is nothing but the promotion of your site to get better Page rank, back links and visitors.There are two techniques used in it.On page SEO and Off page SEO.In On page you need to deal with the content of your site.In off page you need to deal with back links.We are working on Off page.So, the methods followed are blog posting, article posting, classified posting, forum posting, directory submission and press release submission.
There are ample SEO techniques that can help you get rated quickly and make you known. Active participation in blogging, forum posting, submissions on already high ranked pages, social networking, using email marketing and social media tools, are some popular ways.
I think this thread has run it’s course. We’ve got a couple members actually attempting to have a discussion, but their responses are to posters who are not engaging, so this is going round and round.
