Many consider SEO as “Rocket Science” of the Web 2.0 world. It has its own language, ethics, and most importantly, subculture. SEO, in practice, is simply a means to an end. The means being the orchestrated online and offline tactics employed on a website to meet the end, which is to be found by the search engines.

Wikipedia defines SEO as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results for targeted keywords.” In theory, SEO is this supernatural, uber-genius, highly-technical trade that only “nerds” can do. Trust me, I know. This past June, I had a cab driver in Seattle refer to the SMX Advanced event as a “Nerd Convention.” While this may be partially true, SEO is also a mirror of other creative processes utilized in traditional marketing mediums.

Aside from the more advanced aspects of SEO, such as utilizing NOFOLLOW to control the flow of your link juice, using the sIFR technique for header elements on a Flash page, or “white hat cloaking”, the bread and butter of SEO is really simple…unique title tags, META descriptions that ROCK, and strategic use of your robots.txt file. It’s a classic messaging strategy.

The intended purpose of any search engine marketing campaign, SEO included, is to entice the user to click on your client’s ad. Developing the most effective message to ensure you get that click takes a decent level of creativity and advertising prowess. It is important that to consider the following before launching into a SEO campaign:

·Understand the brand and its audience
· Familiarize yourself with the site’s subject matter
· Become comfortable with the tone and structure of the existing content
· Identify the brand personality
· Develop a plan for your search team, marketing teams, IT and legal to work together

Once you have obtained that information, you have to approach each page as its own individual opportunity to sell content. This requires a good keyword strategy.

Your final step includes pulling all of this together in a compelling statement of 50 characters or less for the title and 150 characters or less for the description. Challenging?? YES! Impossible?? NO! For Fortune 500 clients, this, TOGETHER with all of the tech savvy stuff, is what can make or break your chances of survival in the organic space.

So, avoid becoming overwhelmed with such jargon as algorithm, link juice, page rank, and URL canonicalization. Avoid questioning your ethics as a black hatter or a white hatter or arguing your legitimacy in the space because you don’t own an identifiable avatar. SEO is both a trade and an art. It should not be feared because of its technical nature, but embraced for its artistic possibilities. I look forward to meeting you at the next Nerd Convention to trade stories and compare our SEO nerd stripes!