Search engine optimization, or SEO as those in the industry call it, is largely an unknown term to those who don’t work with it. In fact, most people have never even heard of SEO. It is telling that even within the SEO field, not everyone agrees on how it is best achieved.
There are of course the basic guidelines: lots of content on site, properly formed meta tags, get inbound links, give outbound links appropriately, and strong site organization. But the reason SEO continues to be more of an art than a scientific method is because there is no one way to accomplish these things. Exactly how much content does a site need, and how many times does a keyword need to be on a page? How many inbound links do I need and how do I get them? Are paid links ok? Are comment links ok? What makes a good title tag? A good h1 tag? Am I doing anything else wrong that will hurt my rankings?
Most professional SEO providers will provide their client a level of detailed in-depth report similar to one another. But that’s where much of the similarity ends. While most will not have any outright conflicting advise, their content and their approach will be different. If you polled 10 providers for reports, you’d likely get 10 different versions.
This is the challenge for the SEO organization. There is no clear laid out plan that can be picked up and read like a book. There’s no secret site that one can plug into and retrieve all the right answers. As every day at work is different, every company and every website is different. The interesting factor for the SEO provider is the suspense of not knowing immediately if their work is successful. Improved ranking and traffic take time to build and a successful SEO program will achieve that for the client.
Because things are changing so quickly with search engines these days, it takes a professional SEO organization to keep up with where things are going. For an individual to jump into doing SEO work on his own site would require a lot of time, and a lot of faith, and an extensive undestanding of SEO. There’s a reason that some professionals have a great track record and others don’t. It takes experience that can only be gained through a large client base.
