For years, search engine marketing was considered a black art, a dubious world of overpaying consultants to somehow get your website found in the huge and unwieldy web universe. But much of what lies behind SEO, what really works, has been demystified. This chart, part of MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition clearly shows the most important components of SEO, based on the response from over 1,500 marketers. Trying to game the search engines and their algorithms is passé and over.
What rings true in SEO is the same formula used by companies conducting effective PR for eons…the undeniable human need to communicate meaningful information to (thirsty) audiences.
All major searches - Google, Yahoo, Bing – have continually changed and tweaked their algorithms to reflect topflight SEO practices: 1) consistently generated interesting and useful content, 2) that’s properly indexed and tagged, and 3) promoted to engage and build inbound traffic. That’s the secret formula, which is supported by the MarketingSherpa chart below:
