What is SEO to you
-
We define SEO, as search engine optimization.
Though it is more of an art. A web developer is not necessarily a SEO and vice versa.
In my job as a web developer I wear many hats, and often asked what exactly SEO is.
Before panda the seo industry seemed to follow "tricks" to get sites ranked. This practice lead to many seo company's thinking that spamming links, using link exchanges, link rings etc.. was actually the way to "SEO".
So now it seams SEO is simply a short word as to how to get your site in top results, thusly ignoring the actual definition.
As a web developer I always viewed SEO as a way to help the search engines understand what my web page is about.
What do you think SEO means to you and your company?
-
What SEO is to me is a tool in the marketing arsenal. That means optimizing the site to get the most value throughout the chain. Choices abound. What if getting ranked second instead of first means more profit for the business/client?
However, the non-SEO world thinks of SEO as "the way to get ranked first on Google." That reminds me of the old South Park episode titled Gnomes. You've seen it before with a slight modification...
1. Collect Underpants
2. SEO?
3. Profit!I run away from this mindset as fast as possible any more.
-
Great question. For a team that does both on-site SEO and off-site SEO we like to think ourselves as scientists.
We see things that most people don't ever see or even notice. We are both creative and analytic, wordy and mathematical, dorks and geeks.
-
100% agree with the first side of SEO, great example of the dark side. Kudus
-
I agree with you, but what I really like of this job is that there is a base which everyone agrees on and then there is a shady part where everyone makes unique his job, there's a matter of knowledge + creativity.
For example the definition of good may be different from you and I and whatever other seo
-
There's two sides to SEO. Primarily, like you said it should be making improvements that help search engines properly crawl and idex the site. On-page SEO is easy in sense, because the best practices are well established.
Off page SEO is where everything gets shady, way too many SEO companies automating link building, dummy sites with all scraped content, article spinners, the list goes on....
I just fixed up a site that an SEO company had been "building links" for over the last year. The site didn't have keywords in the title tags, had tons of duplicate url issues, repeated content all over the place, etc. Stuff like that just blows my mind, seen it quite a bit.Good SEO should be a solution based on what a client actually needs. Most of the time they won't know, so it's on us to do our research and find out. We need to research the niche, the competition, the whole 9 if we wanna actually provide value. -
Very good, good content, good useability. good ranking.. my thoughts
-
I think that SEO grew alongside the search engines. In the first period the SEOs were geeks programmers which tried to achieve top rankings spammin here and there. both internally and then externally.
Google seemed a machine to game to achieve your top positions. Now I think that Google helped a lot in giving to this job a further qualification. As they evolved their algo we evolved our knowledge in a game which is starting to move from the pure development to a larger integration with the marketing side of our job.
SEOs are everyday more marketing oriented, integrating a lot their job with pr building relationships with other webmasters. As you said I see SEO as an enhanced art where technical knowledge melts with marketing skills.
A good SEO is a marketing artist imo.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
In a pickle. SEO for Personal Brand, Book or Keywords?
I'm getting ready to take on a new client for SEO, but she is having a hard time understanding I'd like to rank her for "Her" and her new book, rather than keywords for her ambiguous keywords which show very little to no search volume from Keyword Planner data. Her website and domain name are only 4 months old Her book launches sometime in December (most likely January 2016) Her services (she's a consultant) provide little keyword volume She is persuaded she needs to rank for her service keywords I feel strongly we need to get her name, her method/approach and her book optimized She is seemingly difficult to work with, but once I build trust in SEO for her, so will be a great, long client Her consulting services are based on Change and Transition for wealthy individuals going through career change, divorce, pay increase, pay decrease, depression, children, etc... targeting Executives, C-Level Execs In this situation, what would you all do? How would this website or person even be optimized? Blog articles? Press releases? Guest blogging? Video blogs? Podcasts? It's a tricky one and hoping the Moz community can lend some ideas as this type of SEO would be new for me, yet I'm up for the challenge! Thank you in advance and look forward to your replies! - Patrick
Search Behavior | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Re-Launching Old website with New SEO Friendly Features - What should I track?
Hey Mozers, I was brought on to the team to Optimize the old website to make it more SEO friendly and I was able to get some cool features up. What Analytic Key points should I keep track of? The website launches in 2 weeks and I think Now would be a great time to start gather data bout the old site. I'd like to make sure I keep the website under a microscope to make sure there are as little errors as possible. What am I missing I already have: Page Authority Domain Authority Bounce Rate Time on page Visitors/Sessions Unique Visitors/Sessions
Search Behavior | | rpaiva0 -
Using https: Beyond the standard seo metrics
Hi All, I've been doing quite a bit of browsing around the topic of utilising https vs http when constructing urls and I wanted to know if anybody has research on the customer perception of a site where all urls are https. We originally used rel canonical tags to inform the browsers that the http and https were the same but we are considering stepping this up to having the http pages redirect to the https and I'm wondering how customers may react if they know that all pages are https. Anybody have insights on possible outcomes? Thanks, Tom
Search Behavior | | Tmon0 -
How to approach SEO for a large site that doesn't have specific keyword goals?
So, I have a project that has 10,000+ page of unique editorial content in a specific industry. They currently get about 500,000 pageviews a month and average just under 2 pages per visit. It has a 66 domain authority and has been doing "the basics" for SEO for about 7 years (headline is an H1, URL is custom while the headline is more "reader friendly", description is a snippet of the body copy a little into the first paragraph, nofollow in the comments). The crux is that it's an editorial publication so they're not targeting specific keywords, but a wide swath of keywords. Would it be best to just dive in and figure out some of the less competitive keywords for some of the articles that they could tailor some content to rank better for, then just move onto more and more? What are some ways to approach this if they just want to raise their general traffic and relevancy to the next level?
Search Behavior | | jpea0 -
Does Page Load Time Affect SEO Rankings?
I was curious about how much page load times affect rankings. Here's what I did: I put together a lot of interactive media on specific landing pages Time-on-Page from organic visitors went from 50 seconds to average of 34 minutes Bounce Rate decreased by 20% Page Load time increased from 1 second to 6 seconds and at peak times to 8 seconds (on 56KB test) In the meantime the page was re-indexed and re-cached My question is three-fold: Would the time on page give higher rankings for keyword Would decreased bounce rate enhance rankings? Would the page load time decrease rankings? Did anyone do a similar test? What were the results?
Search Behavior | | HMCOE0 -
E-commerce SEO when products are shared between sites
We have a couple of e-commerce sites that sell the same product. One focuses more on a niche category of the products, while the others contains a wide variety of products. Will we be hit with a penalty from google if the product descriptions are the same? If so, how much of a difference in content does there need to be? There are only so many ways to describe the product and it is usually done in a couple sentences. The rest of the product description contains bullet points of the products and is the same for each product. We are also looking for a SEO company to work with and wondered if there are companies out there that specialize in e-commerce seo that can work with a small ($500 month) budget. I've looked through the recommended companies directory here, but it seems most have minimum retainers around $1000 a month. Also, what should I look for in an SEO company?
Search Behavior | | toomeycustoms0 -
What's the best SEO management system for link building and reporting?
We've tried multiple management systems, with the last one being Raven Tools (I think this is the most popular). We've also done our own manual tracking in excel and that gets very very tedious and sometimes hard to keep track of. What are some other ones that people have found that have been easy to use and made their work much more efficient (link building/tracking, reporting, competitive research, social, etc.)?
Search Behavior | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Google button +1 ( SEO point-of-view )
Hello Folks, First of all, I want to start by: this is a "discussion" topic, which theres no right or wrong answer. I would love to hear from everyone your toughts about the GOOGLE +1 BUTTON , for the SEO point-of-view indeed. I assume that I did not add it to my websites yet, theres some reasons why. You guys added it? How is your audience behaviors against the button, they often click on it? It changed anything in your ranks, after they clicked on it? Thanks in advance.
Search Behavior | | augustos0