Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Is Two Faced

“Love and Marriage, (SEO Marketing and SEO Engineering) You Can’t Have One Without the Other.” – ok maybe that song lyric was a stretch…

Traditionally Search marketing agencies have focused on only one aspect of search engine optimization which has been the marketing aspect. This includes writing good copy, making sure the best keywords were in the meta data and presenting a site to the search engines and clients from the “marketing standpoint”.

While this is definitely a portion of what SEO entails there is still another face to search engine optimization that most firms don’t explore to the depth in which they should, and by not doing so, could come back to bite them and the client in the butt.

Let’s first look at the normal vision of the search marketer, and I use that term loosely since that title only encompasses 1 face of SEO. Ok anyway let’s get back to the subject at hand. First the marketing side of SEO which includes the “marketing” imagine that, of the site in the search engines. The marketing of a site contains a few parts; the meta tags (title, description, keywords), which help with ranking in the search engines, website presentation and usability once a user gets to the site, and the content on the page which helps with ranking and conversion. I must say that content for conversion does not have to be text on the page and one might argue video on the page is better at increasing the conversion rate for the page than having a lot of text, but for SEO purposes text is necessary.

This marketing is where most search marketing firms excel, yet they miss the bigger piece of the puzzle which in many cases can drastically inhibit the thousands of dollars the client pays for the “search marketing” for their site that has been done by a SEO firm. I’m sure you have heard the line “well just wait a little longer and your rankings will come”, meanwhile you’re dumping hundreds or thousands of dollars into this promise. Yes it takes time to gain rankings, but at some point you have to look at how the site is engineered if you’re not getting the results you want. This leads me to the 2nd, and some might say the most important part of SEO that should be a “campaign” of its own before the marketing portion is started. This second face is the technical engineering and site structure which effects how the search engines see, analyze, index your site and crawl its links.

This technical engineering and site structure contains more than the basic 301 and 302 analyzing and crawl analysis, it pulls in how the title tags, internal linking, inbound links, and URL’s are engineered from a SEO standpoint, how the sitemap is structured, if there is a robots.txt file or if one is needed, content categorization and navigation structure for proper SEO crawling into deeper pages.

So back to my original statement about using the title of “search marketer” loosely it should really be called a SEO marketing engineer to encompass the 2 sides to SEO. I have only one piece of advise before I send you on your way into the art/science of finding a good SEO firm or doing SEO yourself, just make sure you l look at both these sides of SEO and don’t pour all your money or time into just one of these.

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