Building Traffic and Making Money
SEO-the common abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization-is, as I've said before, "a wild-west frontier of the Internet: a boisterous new field with burgeoning revenues that employs tens of thousands of people with job titles and descriptions that did not exist five years ago."
That said, SEO has come of age, along with its slightly more respectable relative, CPC-or Cost Per Click-advertising via Google AdWords (or elsewhere).
Any business, no matter its size, needs to include an Internet marketing and advertising component as part of its business plan. For some businesses, this Internet marketing effort is the only advertising that is necessary. A key component of this marketing plan is crafting an effective SEO strategy.
In crafting your effective SEO strategy, it is necessary to walk a narrow line. Over aggressive tricks-sometimes called Blackhat SEO-do not work in the long run, except for scamsters. On the other hand, it is right and just to put one's best foot forward, and get as a high a natural search ranking as possible.
Contextually, SEO needs to be regarded as a component of online marketing and advertising. It's perfectly reasonable to allocate a percentage of resources to SEO at the same time as a CPC budget is formulated.
While there are some responsible and reputable SEO consultants, the field has not entirely emerged from an era of gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism.
In response, my electronic book Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money is available as downloadable PDF from O'Reilly, the publisher. It's not about getting rich quick, and is focused on concise nuts and bolts issues. You can take this PDF to the boardroom and understand the technology issues underlying SEO (it won't replace your marketing consultant). If you are a do-it-yourself webmaster, my PDF should tell you everything you need to become a SEO whiz from a technical perspective.
Posted by Harold Davis at July 13, 2006 1:27 PM
