Five years ago nobody was paying too close attention to SEO in the online marketing industry
. We were all recovering from the horrible dot com era that wiped out so many businesses. Nobody knew what it was and it has not reached popularity status as it has today. I'd like to think I had something to do with that. I was there when the big ball came crashing down to the ground. The Dot Com movement was stubborn headed bull that smashed through everybody's greatest perceptions of the web and stomped all over investor dollars. That's what got my attention in the first place. I started out looking for the good of all companies.
I found a lot of trickery out there. A lot of it still continues on to this day of course. There will always be another side that runs counter to "doing the right thing". I still run into some downright scandalous creatures out there who stuff tiny 4 point white type on white page backgrounds and call themselves SEO. It's outrageous. DMOZ was a great strategy years ago. This stuff used to be the way to go back in the not so distant past. But when Chicago corporations start to raise an eyebrow of interest I get a little scared. I am here to set a new course of thinking.
Either you can do SEO or you cannot. You know it really comes back down to writing. You have to write for two different audiences. The bots have to be satisfied so they can classify your web pages and file them properly. Remember that real live breathing people are reading your web pages. You want people to actually read your material and stay on your page.
This is another kind of interaction - hence interactive media. This is what I did for a recent Yamaha atv parts campaign. This can work for any kind of motorsports group because at the end of the day I wanted to connect to this tight niche market. I had to appeal to these guys without having my pages look like it was automated by spam software. Its people who buy your stuff online so you need to appeal to them.
Link building is another important factor of SEO these days. This wasn't always the case a few years ago. But if you make the right types of connections on the web you can ethically beat your competitors. We beat 30 million competitors on Yahoo in just 6 days. This is the kind of transformation you are really searching for with your marketing dollar. In most cases I would recommend that a company expand its existing budget to accommodate this type of life changing event. The search engines have become smarter and want to file away more content. Our job is to do this ethically so we can get ranked quicker and keep our economic objectives on track.