SEO: What's Working; What's Not

I recently read a posting, where the poster was looking for an SEO specialist who could work with the metadata for a specific product / asset. The reason the ad struck me, is that they were looking for a "specialist" - but at the same time dictating the best methodology for accomplishing their SEO needs. If you're working in corporate America in technology, you'll understand this posting to be a part of daily life - a quite Dilbert-esque daily life.

Let's get some facts straight about SEO. Because best practices are changing daily, I suggest:

• Read up on the subject -daily
• View SEO in the proper perspective
• Assemble a small SEO team and meet at least once a week (this meeting should take 15 minutes or less)
• Monitor performance -daily

Viewing SEO in the proper perspective means that SEO is not a stand alone effort. Like all marketing efforts, it should be part of a larger arsenal that includes, AdWords, viral efforts (blogging), advertising and PR. We've worked with clients that ignore PR but were heavy into advertising and vice versa. Without getting into the ongoing debate about PR vs. Advertising, the correct methodology is coordination and balance between all efforts. When your campaigns are running, your website needs to match what's in those campaigns.

Your SEO team should include a webmaster and marketing person (if possible, junior-level will suffice). What should be discussed during the weekly meeting is traffic analysis and if applicable - sales and competition.

At the beginning of this blog I talked about metadata. The current problem with metadata is that search engines are more commonly crawling what's on the pages of a site -rather than what's in the metadata. For example, our SpellBy.com site has a visually weighted home page. Given this information - we now have to switch our strategy to include more product descriptions, which is something we were always reluctant to do because we know that most consumer purchases are based on the strength of the product images. Here, SEO changes what was once a best practice for selling product --not because it doesn't work anymore once a customer gets to your page - but because of the necessity of getting the customer to your page in the first place.