SEO – wearing a suit for an interview
Published by on July 6th, 2008 2 Comments »
As I move my professional focus from picking up all manner of bits and pieces when there’s no-one else to do it, and into the highly focused and targeted tasks involved in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), one of the most frequently raised questions seems to be: Why do SEO?
In some circles, SEO has something of a tarnished image, having suffered at the hands of less reputable, unprofessional companies and individual who fast-track their projects with what are know as “Black-Hat” techniques. They are increasingly rare these days as Google and the other big search engines become wise to their techniques and deliberately reduce their effectiveness – remember the gold-old-days when the top search results on Google were frequently just pages with links to other sites?
Traditionally, SEO activity was seen as manipulating the results returned by a search engine for a particular search term. I see it more as enhancement of search engine visibility, and improved organic search traffic.
Ethical SEO is no more manipulation than is wearing a suit for a job interview where your potential employer is the search engine and your potential salary is the search traffic. So I would like to relabel SEO to OSE – Organic Search Enhancement.
As the internet grows, enhancing one’s site’s visibility on search engines become yet more critical to being found than it ever has been. And yet, the vast majority of people with websites, businesses included, do not make even the most basic and straightforward changes in order to make their content more attractive to search engines.
All-out OSE is very labour-intensive, requiring detailed research, planning, implementation, then measurement, assessment and strategy re-alignment. Lots of complicated sounding words, but the process is much like maintaining the growth of weeds in your garden. It is a never-ending task with constantly shifting goal-posts.
Much of the work, particularly the research and implementation (and the measurement and the planning) are thoroughly tedious and while there are tools to help, there are no short-cuts. Perhaps that is why so many individuals who could gain a great deal never get around to learning the single best way to encourage new website visitors.
2 Responses to “SEO – wearing a suit for an interview”
I’m making an effort to educate local busiensses in my area about SEO by starting an internet marketing meetup group. I recommend more people do the same. Invite local businesses and other SEO professionals.
I like the interview suit angle, it’s a matter of not getting yourself blocked out of consideration from a hiring manager or search bot. Beyond just keeping your self in the job search or web search game, a suit or good SEO/OSE practices will move you up in the relative against candidate sites or job candidates. Other good sites and candidates are putting their best foot forward so you or your client need to do the same. I do like the interview suit analogy.
Maybe we need an SEO Dress for Success book. Sorry, that was a bit corny.