SEO as an Enduring Art Form

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

  • Make content accessible to search engine crawlers.

  • Find the keywords that searchers employ (i.e., 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 votes for your content in the form of editorial links and social media mentions from good sources by building inviting, shareable content and applying classic marketing techniques to the online world.

  • Create web pages that allow users to find what they want extremely quickly, ideally in the blink of an eye.

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 the future. In addition, mastery of social media environments is now required of most SEO professionals.

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. The requirements currently include social media optimization expertise, local search expertise, video optimization expertise, an understanding of what is coming in mobile ...

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