SEO is a School of Thought

I was reading an article online, and the author Todd Malicoat, was saying that SEO is becoming a school of thought, rather than a process. It is interesting actually, and I do agree with him. SEO is really becoming a school of thought – a way of thinking!

The process of search engine optimization is straightforward and easy; the understanding of the SEO thought process is ongoing and exceedingly complex.

Well, of course, if you had talked to people not in the SEO or Internet Marketing business, some of them wouldn’t even understand why there is a need for SEO in the first place. Its true that most people still believe in the myth of “When I build a website, people will come”. I had to spend a considerable amount of time yesterday night explaining to my friend over MSN why he needed to settle his canonical domain name issue.

SEO is a subset of the big “Website Marketing” business. There are other ways to drive traffic to your site – like PPC engines, email marketing, and even marketing offline by placing your URL on your physical brochures and namecards.

Internet Marketers do not need SEO

In another post, I’ve read that Internet Marketers do not need SEO., what they need is a hypnotic long sales letter, a huge email list, and an autoresponder system.

Quite true.

SEO results do not come fast. You can’t force Googlebot or Inktomi Slurp to come and spider your site right away, even though you could submit your site to them. In fact, even after almost 2 months, the rankings of this blog on Yahoo! and Google are so different. From what I’ve learnt, Inktomi is slower in spidering new content.

Well, that’s the “SEO School of Thought”. It is not only about optimizing websites by getting your keywords right, paying attention to meta tags and headers, it is about understanding the whole realm of things like how those spiders work and the WHY behind many of these optimizing tips.

Blogs versus Websites

Bringing it back to blog marketing, many argue that search engines favor blogs to normal websites. (Have I talked about this before? ) Is that true? If it really is true, then the next question will really be “What distinguishes a website from a blog?” Is it the frequent updates, the RSS feeds, the comments, the structure of the HTML, or a combination of these that helps the spider make a decision to mark a URL as a blog? That is the thought process of the true SEO specialists!