Saturday, December 27, 2008

There Is No One Right Way In SEO

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.

Most everyone does agree on basic guidelines though. Guidelines like high site content, receiving and giving inbound and outbound links, proper meta tags and strong organization of the site. The problem is that there is no one formula that dictates the ratio or value of each of those things, so by its nature, SEO continues to be more of an art form than a scientific method. A good SEO provider is constantly juggling and balancing between all the factors as they carefully watch the movement of the website in the rankings.

Ask 10 SEO companies s to perform a site analysis, and you;ll get 10 different reports. Luckily most of them will have quite a bit of overlap. And luckier still, provided they are bona fide SEOs , most will not have any outright conflicting advice. But still, the finesse and attention to detail that a good SEO agent possesses will be evident in the varied responses you would see in these 10 reports.

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.

For an individual to perform successful SEO work on their own website is nearly impossible because of all the nuances involved these days. And things change regularly, in fact so rapidly that only an experienced SEO provider with an extensive performance history is likely to be able to keep up with them. The best way to assure success is to check out providers and look at their track record.

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