subject: What SEO and Internet Marketing Really Is [print this page] What is SEO? It's a question that comes up during a lot of the talks that we do. The reason why it comes up a lot is because the folks we give presentations and talks to, these are computer science folks that are in the web business, and have been in the web business for decades. They're curious about what it is internet marketers think they can do that will "optimize" a search engine. I'll be at a hardware conference on the east coast, and they'll argue that there's nothing "optimizing" about writing up a bunch of content, in order to rank higher on a web search listing. Businesses have affixed triple-As to their DBAs for decades, and now they're calling this optimizing? Did it take a legion of crafty copywriters in the 70s to come up with "optimization" techniques for the white and yellow pages? No. The fact is, is that this whole game is run by a bunch of bedroom CEOs that have taken a tad bit of cleverness, and leveraged it across the almost 2 billion users on the web today. That's all that's about.
In retrospect, financial and economic historians are going to wonder why more billionaires weren't minted out of the web than there were or are today. With 2 billion people, almost a third of the world's population now online, why aren't more people able to do more business than is already being done on the web? Google's still a banner ad company, trying to branch out into SaaS that's completely unrelated to search, and the fact is, the dollar productivity and efficiency in terms of profit margins about the web, when all economic costs are considered, is still pretty dismal. We haven't come all that far from Pets.com. It's time to get a little honest about what the web currently is: a huge classifieds section.
So if you want to take a behind the curtain pre-release look at the facebook secret that is about to shake the internet to its core then I strongly recommend you read everything on the next page before it's too late!
