What is SEO today?
Just a few years ago, a 'good' search engine optimisation company would have been a master of the latest optimisation innovations. It would get its clients' sites into high positions, delivering thousands of visitors every day. The fact that the positions were earned through stealth techniques like cloaking and spamdexing, that the clients were often in the adult or gambling sectors and that the traffic was more notable for its quantity than its quality was, naturally, of lesser importance.
Today, a good SEO will still be a search engine expert and will still get its clients to the top of the listings - but there the resemblance ends. Once described as a 'black art', search engine optimisation has come out of the twilight zone to be a respected, effective and essential part of Internet marketing strategy. SEO today is more about helping web sites harness the power of the search engines and less about misleading the search engines into giving those sites higher rankings than they would otherwise merit.
A good SEO, for example, wouldn't dream of using cloaking or spamdexing. It might not matter to a faceless porn site if its pages get banned or blacklisted because it will have a new domain ready and waiting and can reinvent itself in moments. But a big brand that has invested millions in its online business and values its net integrity can't take that risk.
Likewise, a good SEO has in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of each search engine's ranking algorithms and submission processes. But it uses that knowledge to help its clients abide by the search engine's rules rather than stay one step ahead of the spiders.
That's why search engine optimisation is still alive and well despite the advent of paid-for positioning. As part of an integrated SEO campaign, there's a place for pay-per-click. It's a complement, rather than an alternative to traditional SEO such as meta tag optimisation or Weboptimiser's pioneering concept; micro-sites. Pay-per-click is quick to implement, doesn't require any site changes and delivers wide search engine coverage. It can be used to kick-start an optimisation campaign and deliver interim visibility while a longer term strategy, such as a search engine-friendly re-design, is being prepared.
There are also several ways in which an SEO company can help clients enjoy a better return on their pay-per-click investment. It can provide a complete, managed service with a level of expertise and resources that few clients would wish to support in-house. The best SEOs have a dedicated Bid Manager to ensure that clients aren't paying a penny-per-click more than they need and a back-end development specialist who can optimise a database-driven site's entire content for search engines. A good SEO will also be able to conduct research, using data directly from the search engines themselves, to discover the key phrases which will still provide a good level of traffic at a fraction of the cost of the most popular terms.
Furthermore, a good SEO can enable access to pay-per-click optimisation services that clients couldn't get on their own. For example, only a handful of carefully chosen SEOs, including Weboptimiser, can offer Trusted Feed, which works by submitting site data directly to the search engine's index via XML feed. Trusted Feed is ideal for database-driven sites such as shopping, travel and auctions which, because of their vast, constantly-changing content, would be impossible to optimise any other way. With Trusted Feed, sites can not only optimise their entire content but can take visitors straight to that content from the search engine listing rather than dropping them off at the home page and expecting them to find their own way from there.
The launch of Trusted Feed, which effectively enables the SEO to pre-review sites, thus doing part of the search engine's job, demonstrates the intermediary role between sites and search engines that the top SEOs now play and the search engine's own recognition that SEOs can be partners as well as customers. In short, while SEO used to be about being search engine-savvy, today it's about being search engine-friendly.
Thanks to search engines, Internet users have access to millions of sites they would never have found otherwise. Thanks to search engine optimisation, web sites are not only easier to find, but can be faster to load and more intuitive to use. And thanks to SEO companies, the search engines can monetise their services while dealing with a professional customer base. Everybody benefits from SEO today.
David White
CEO
Weboptimiser Ltd
