Every website owner in the world is looking to do the same thing–garner traffic. Traffic is king on the Internet, it drives advertising revenue and helps websites to become more influential. Building traffic is an integral part of building a website that is worth something. As this article points out, SEO is an easy way to build traffic for your website, if only you do it right.

Whether it’s for a business, an organization, a church, a school or a civic group seeking to build community awareness, the principles are the same. With a few fundamental search engine optimization measures, aka SEO, it’s easy to increase website “hits” and build that desired awareness.

SEO isn’t always easy, but it is a surefire way to build traffic, especially for those websites whose content concerns are highly competitive. Vermont is home to a lot of websites, and many of them could use search engine optimization work.

Social networking has exploded onto the Internet scene over the last five years in a big way. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all social networks which have millions of members and which maintain high profiles. One new trend that is emerging is using these social networking websites in search.

Businesses are quickly realizing that optimizing and leveraging these social channels are only going to grow as an integral part of their marketing efforts, in addition to their existing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Businesses can’t afford to ignore social, namely because this is where consumers are spending most of their time.

If you want to get to the consumer at the place where he or she spends the most time and views the most advertising, social networks really are the right place to go. Just Facebook is home to over 500,000 million registered users who spent countless hours logging their personal preferences and personal information into the website. If this information were searchable, and some of it is, then the search industry would benefit immensely–this is where everything is headed, Vermont.

Search engine optimization certainly is a maligned industry, that part Lisa Barone has down pat in her latest article. She also hits the nail on the head when she says most of the critics of SEO simply do not know the industry or how it came about to fulfill a need for perfectly respectable people. With that said, she perhaps does gloss over the presence of Black-Hat SEO types and the ethical questions that are sometimes involved in SEO work.

With all of that said, Barone gives some good advice on why your SEO investment may not be panning out the way you’d hoped. The best one is first one, so that’s what I’ll quote here:

You’re writing a check your brand can’t cash

Being an SEO is a bit like being an athlete. As excited as you may be, you’re not going to magically wake up tomorrow with the strength to overtake a Kenyan in the New York Marathon. But if you train for it, sculpt your body correctly, and build that foundation in your legs and muscles, then you might have a fighting chance…to come in directly after the Kenyans (let’s not be ridiculous). SEO works in a very similar way.

The second suggestion is that if your SEO investment is less than your weekly coffee bill, you are likely not going to see very much of the type of results you want. I’ll let you read the other tips–but one of them is sub-titled, “You chase unicorn tactics”, if that doesn’t pique my Vermont friends’  interest enough to read the original article, I don’t know what will.

The SEO industry is wholly dependent upon the success of the search engine industry in general. Without the success of companies like Bing and Google, search engine optimization ceases to be a useful industry. SEO professionals depend upon the growth of the popularity of search, plain and simple. Luckily, there is some good news coming out of a JP Morgan report.

The company predicts that Americans will conduct up to 12 percent more searches over the course of the next 12 months. B2B firms that focus on international clients may be even more fortunate, as J.P. Morgan anticipates global search rates will improve 19 percent year-over-year.

This represents significant growth–if the JP Morgan report is correct, then the industry will grow by leaps and bounds, which will only serve to make search engine optimization more important in the long run.

DecorMyEyes is a website which sells eyeglasses, sunglasses, and various accessories thereof. The website has attracted a lot of press in recent days because of its apparently disingenuous style of Search Engine Optimization. DecorMyEyes would attempt to accrue negative reviews in order to boost their search rank. But Google appears to have put an end to this practice.

Search engine giant Google, starting this week, has plugged an offensive SEO tactic to increase page ranking by web sellers. This strategy by unscrupulous web owners targets negative reviews as a means of increasing traffic and landing their web pages in top pages of Google.

This is a good thing, for sure. People should not be able to promote themselves to the top of certain search keywords by treating customers badly. That is just bad practice–as well as a backwards rewards system.

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