The Art of SEO

SEO As an Enduring Art Form

Today, SEO can be fairly easily categorized as having four major objectives:

• Make pages accessible to search engine crawlers.

• Find the keywords that searchers employ (understand your target audience) and make your site speak their language.

• Build content that users will find useful, valuable, and worthy of sharing. Ensure that they’ll have a good experience on your site to improve the likelihood that you’ll earn links and references.

• Earn editorial links from good sources by building inviting, link-worthy content and applying classic marketing techniques to the online world.

Note, though, that the tactics an SEO practitioner might use to get links from editorial sources have been subject to rapid evolution, and will continue to be. In addition, mastery of social media environments is also likely to be an expertise that most SEO professionals will be required to have.

One thing that you can be sure about in the world of search is change, as forces from all over the Web are impacting search in a dramatic way.

To be an artist, the SEO practitioner needs to see the landscape of possibilities for her website, and pick the best possible path to success. This currently includes social media optimization expertise, local search expertise, video optimization expertise, an understanding of what is coming in mobile, and more. That’s a far cry from the backroom geek of the late 1990s.

No one can predict what the future will bring and what will be needed to successfully market ...