Saturday, December 27, 2008

SEO Permanently In The Gray Area

By Julie Johnson

The term SEO, or search engine optimization, is still an unknown to virtually everyone who doesn't work in that field. Most people have never even heard of the term nor know what it refers to. But the more interesting part is that even within the SEO industry, not everyone agrees on how best to approach the problems SEO sets out to solve.

There are of course the basic guidelines: lots of content on site, properly formed meta tags, get inbound links, give outbound links appropriately, and strong site organization. But the reason SEO continues to be more of an art than a scientific method is because there is no one way to accomplish these things. Exactly how much content does a site need, and how many times does a keyword need to be on a page? How many inbound links do I need and how do I get them? Are paid links ok? Are comment links ok? What makes a good title tag? A good h1 tag? Am I doing anything else wrong that will hurt my rankings?

Most professional SEO organizations will have a significant amount of overlap in their site analyses. And luckily, most of their advice to clients will not conflict. But still, if you asked 10 different SEO agents to perform a bona fide site analyis, you'd likely get 10 different reports. That's just the nature of the beast. The beauty is that most all good SEO providers will provide a level of depth and attention to detail in their reports similar to that which others provide.

The industry is an exciting one for SEO providers. Because there's no clear cut right or wrong way, much of their work is based on inherent knowledge, experience, and a whole lot of intuitiveness. Nobody has a secret plan that will work 100% every time, and every website is different in its needs and goals. Building traffic and improving rankings are the only way a SEO provider gets a "report card". And because SEO work takes time before the effects are seen, there's almost a magical excitement present that the suspense of not knowing brings.

Because things are changing so quickly with search engines these days, it takes a professional SEO organization to keep up with where things are going. For an individual to jump into doing SEO work on his own site would require a lot of time, and a lot of faith, and an extensive undestanding of SEO. There's a reason that some professionals have a great track record and others don't. It takes experience that can only be gained through a large client base.

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