It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, in recent years, the number of SEO experts at large seems to correlate with the amount of attention given by marketers to their digital media outlets.  It’s fundamental business opportunism: if more people are becoming sensitive to the need for their content to be visible in search engines, then the growing market for this type of partnership certainly lends itself to the growing cadre of SEO experts out there.  But how many of them are in it for the long haul?

SEO: a digital cottage industry.

It’s not hard to solicit a dozen SEO proposals in the blink of an eye.  One common approach to SEO consultation is to crystallize a process and then scale it with minimal variance; armed with a “proprietary” series of workflows, the SEO tactician goes to work.  Results may come and go, but irrespective of the end game, the client is often mystified by the process.  The relationship has not necessarily empowered them to do their jobs any better.

This, like so much else in the digital marketing world, is changing.  The SEO function has evolved from a mere collection of tactics into an art and science which needs to be tightly wound within the overarching business strategy (articulated very well by Jill Whalen just a few weeks ago; “Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?”).  Jill takes aim at “useless SEO parlor tricks” and instead issues an open call for a closer, more symbiotic relationship with the client.

Tempted to tweak?

Back in the day, we always knew enough about Google’s PageRank algorithm — the set of criteria which governs how one page outranks another in search results — to know that it was good practice to build lots of inbound links to one’s website.  Our ingenuity spawned a brilliant doctrine for modern webmaster relations: “you link to my site, I’ll link to your site.”  The problem is, links between sites with no apparent relevancy to each other began springing up all over the web, and search engines squashed the practice by limiting its impact on search rankings.

By 2007, people caught on and began buying links from “reputable” sources, until Google’s crackdown on paid links.  Remember when PageRank sculpting became all the rage?  Sorry folks.  Google engineer Matt Cutts shot down misuse of the Nofollow tag just about a month ago.

Death, taxes and search evolution.

The point here is NOT that a good SEO program simply needs to stay one step ahead of these algorithmic changes.  Instead, it’s to acknowledge the fact that search engines will continually refine their algorithms ad infinitum.  Marketers and SEO’s may be compelled to react with a scalpel, making small reactive changes to their website’s markup and server configurations.  Even in the absence of an overt media cost, however, these changes still require the allocation of human resources.  This frequently makes SEO micro-management a short-sighted approach — and more often than not, breaking news from Search Engine Land or SEOmoz won’t shake the foundation of a sound content strategy.

This means, quite simply, that what we choose to publish is far more important than the way we format it.  Fusing keyword research, competitive analysis and creative development, and applying a baseline measurement platform to benchmark progress across digital and offline channels is a much more sustainable path to search engine success.

All the essential SEO best practices should be baked into the digital marketing agenda from the start.  Ultimately, however, the profitable pursuit of search visibility will live and die by the intellectual capital put forth in the website’s most apparent public-facing asset: its content.

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About Paul Burani

Paul Burani - Partner, Web Liquid Group. Connect with me on Google+

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