Social Media Blog by Michael BritoSocial Media Blog written by Michael Brito.

And if someone tells you that it is, they are misleading you. In fact, SEO is quite easy to learn if you have the time. I have been engaged with SEO for almost 10 years now and have watched it evolve almost daily from a time when spamming the meta tags was considered good practice.

I was asked by a few marketing friends of mine if I could provide a brief overview of SEO; after all, marketers with this skill set are quickly becoming a hot commodity in the market. At first I thought about writing an eBook about this topic but I really don’t have the time and there are already tons of good eBooks out there. So here goes:

There are really two components of SEO; content optimization (aka on-page optimization) and link building (aka off-page optimization). Content optimization is something you have complete control over. It simply means optimizing the actual content on your web pages. When I say content I mean the HTML (i.e. web copy, meta tags, alt tags). The most challenging part of this, especially if you have a site with several hundred pages, is mapping the keywords to specific pages. It’s good practice to optimize one page for 3 - 4 keywords to get the best value from the search engines.

Basically, link building is just that; increasing (or building) the number of links to your site (aka: back links, inbound links, one way links) from external web sites. There are several variables and things to consider when link building (i.e. anchor text, relevance, link farms, link bait, Digg bait, white hat/black hat, etc.) that I will not get into. Think of it as a popularity contest; the more relevant, external sites that link to yours the better! The challenge of link building is that it takes time and patience; and you have no control whatsoever who links to your site.  Garret French, who blogs over at Search Marketing Standard, sums it up quite well defining the research phase of link building. Research is key! The last thing you want to do is start a link building campaign without research, planning, setting metrics/goals etc.

So, what’s more important: links or content?

I guess this depends on who you ask. I would say that 90% of your ranking is from inbound links. In fact, I have achieved number one placement for very competitive keywords for a site built entirely in flash; so basically there was no content on the web page other than the meta tags. Lee Odden summarizes this argument quite well; basically stating that Links and content are both necessary for competitive search marketing efforts. Emphasizing one over the other depends on the situation. Excelling at both is the ideal.

The key takeaway is this: both content optimization and link building are important; and if you can, do your best to spend considerable time with each when building out your SEO plans. Oh, and here is an excellent resource on things you can do to gain links to your site.

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