SEO Can’t Do Magic…

These days are good days for SEO professionals as SEO has again become one the hottest internet marketing topics. Companies from various industries are looking to improve their search engine visibility by implementing best SEO practices. Implementing title tags, meta tags, and alt tags is a must these days. Sure, some of these techniques are rather dated and do not offer much benefit but not implementing them is a bonehead move.

Unfortunately, executives, who by the way don’t know anything about anything, think of SEO as a magic pill. I have personally dealt with a few executives who believe they can go from let’s say 10K visitors per month to 10M by implementing the right title tags. In most industries, traffic is not really the KPI that you are looking for, conversion is. So, that would even make it more difficult to get a huge boost from just putting the right title tags.

What SEO can do, if done right, is give you more visibility through search engines. But you need to consider best practices + emerging techniques (e.g. SMO, ORM) to make it happen. But landing optimization, web usability, and magnetic content also need to be considered if you expect to get anything out of your SEO efforts. Implementing title tags, optimizing your URLs, and taking advantage of other best practices are nice and will give you a little boost. But don’t expect to go from zero to a million just by doing the minimum.