I had a great discussion last week with one of the creative directors I work with who wanted to know what SEO is. Our discussion moved from the usual definitions (technical blah blah blah) all the way into topics like branding and email marketing.

SEO is therefore at the core of any business that wishes to be visible online and stand out from the crowd…

Search engine optimization is the collection of activities that make your site visible to the search engines – but it doesn’t stop there. SEO also includes website conversion, ROI analysis, web stats, branding and social media marketing.

SEOs (the people who perform search engine optimization) rely heavily on marketing for sources of information and for overall strategic input. What happens if a company’s SEO team doesn’t talk to its marketing team? You end up with knowledge silos developing and for all intents and purposes the company splits in two.

SEO must form part of your business strategy for you to benefit 100% from what it has to offer.

What does the typical SEO do on a daily basis?

Usually the SEO department or consultancy will perform the following activities:

• Keyword research to create content strategies (knowing what keywords are important to rank for determines what content should appear on your site)
• Competitor analysis
• Creation of SEO-optimized web content
• On-page website optimization (meta data, load speeds, canonicalization issues, duplicate content, clean URL structures and much much more)
• Press release writing and submission to press release portals
• Link building (through many different means including social media, link bait creation, intelligent link exchanges and so on)
• Reporting of results: search traffic, ranking reports, conversion reports
• Industry research (what’s going on in the search engine world?)
• Social media activities (Twittering, Facebooking, developing crafty social media activities)
• Developing viral campaign elements such as games, applications and calculators

The important thing to remember is that SEO is never really finished. Oh, how we laughed when we were told on Christmas Eve that we could “go home when our work was finished”.

For SEOs, work is never really completed.