Living the SEO Adventure in Practice and Theory
Web marketing may be divided into several practice areas. Basic Website design requires creative skills and technical skills in both markup language and graphic design. Advertising management requires knowledge of audience measurement, creative design, and technical functions. Newsletter marketing probably doesn’t require as much creative graphical talent as it does creative writing ability. Without a doubt the most complex marketing area is search engine optimization.
That’s not to dis people who design and manage online advertising. All those floating ads, flash-display interstitials, and creative banner placements take a lot of talent. Think of the Mac-PC ads Apple ran some Websites where the characters moved back and forth between two “windows”. That’s good stuff. We should respect the work that goes into designing interactive advertising.
But search engine optimization doesn’t just create an advertisement. SEO, as it’s called, takes you on an adventure. You go exploring a whole new region of the universe. Search engine optimization, SEO, helps you look into people’s minds in a more direct way than advertising does. With SEO you really have to reach out to what people want to know and understand. You have to create a bridge to their feelings. Advertising touches the emotional state of mind of the viewer but it rarely engages the audience for any length of time. SEO might have to bring people back again and again.
It’s hard to put it into the right words. There is so much work that goes into SEO because there is a lot of theory behind the practice. You can go out and slap Websites together and pick keywords but you have to know why you want to pick certain keywords over others. The way SEO theory explains it, the World Wide Web is an ecosystem that search engines categorize according to users’ needs. You have to understand those needs.
If you’re going to follow SEO theory then you should be prepared for the ride of your life. Search engine optimization theory looks at the interaction of systems and groups in ways you just won’t find in SEO books and blogs. You get some good information from other sources out there. Everyone shares. But when you want to understand the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization, you need to spend some time learning more about SEO theory.
