SEO: It’s Not Internet Marketing
Normally when I see people talking about search engine optimization, they lump it in with Internet marketing. (This goes back to yesterday’s rant about online PR being “gobbled up” by the Internet marketing umbrella, b/c of the industry’s lousy job of explaining PR to the laymen.) In fact, SEO isn’t Internet marketing at all. And more recently you may have seen the term “SEO PR” tossed around (another of those stupid buzzwords that piss me off, because it’s entirely redundant). Here’s why:
Simply put, search engine optimization is, and always has been, an online PR tactic, just a sometimes misguided one. There are a few reasons why SEO professionals are more PR practitioners than marketers:
1. SEO is about improving “exposure” and “visibility.”
2. SEO is NOT about directly increasing sales or other actions by the searcher (whether or not they click is left up to the marketing copy making up the site description, and whether or not they stay, buy, sign up, or whatever is dependent on the marketing ability of the landing page… not the actual ranking in the SERPs).
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Comments
“Promotion” would be handled by the marketing people. “Publicity” would fall more within the realm of PR. ;)
You still really can’t argue though that SEO, in it’s nature, is all about the goal of getting exposure in search results. It’s just a highly specialized form of PR, and certainly doesn’t mean that SEOs know about all other aspects of PR, not that all PR pros are up on their SEO. Just because it’s technical, it doesn’t mean it can’t be PR. That would be like saying Internet marketing can’t be marketing for the same reason. ;)
My ‘big beef’ now is the same as it has been since the beginning of the net… there seems to always be people to tell us how to ‘beat’ the search engines, but rarely have I even found those people under the natural search results for the very keywords they are touting.
I use software for my SEM… it doesnt get you top spots over night for the top positions, but it makes it easy to get the low hanging friut, and so far, that has been good enough for me.
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Search Engine Marketing Software… Super Affiliate
I disagree - sorta. I definitely see your point here, but you’re only looking at the promotional side of SEO. There is also the technical side, which is every bit as important.
I would argue that SEO and PR are completely different - yet - complimentary.
SEOs, ideally, should only handle the technical side (mod-rewrites, hosting, redirects, dynamically optimized pages etc)
Marketing should choose the keywords.
Public Relations should promote the site and know how to use keywords to do it.