SEOMatrix LLC Blog: Your Daily Ethical Search Engine Marketing Treats

Remember when Gene Hackman hollered “patch him up” to the concerned doctor in Hoosierswhen one of his player’s stitches came out during a critical point in a decisive game. Hackman hesitated for only about a second when he decided not to play his critically wounded high schooler.  Using some 1950s nylon would have undoubtedly only masked the underlying injury, potentially causing irreparable damage to the young man it inflicted. Approaching marketing challenges parallel this Hackman methodology. My thesis:

The definition of ”Myopic SEO or SEM” is any Internet marketing practice that only scrapes the surface of a site’s potential to be recognized, useful, and authoritative. Myopic SEO can also be articulated as an attitude or philosophy about how to “optimize” specific websites. Approaching any business should be done with the antithesis of narrowminded and segregated thinking - back it up a bit before sticking on the band aids kids. Examples of Myopic SEO or SEM are as follows:

• adding alt tags to images simply because they aren’t there
• obtaining inbound links without understanding the best anchor text to utilize and toggle
• removing javascript indiscriminately throughout a website without considering conversions
• tracking one type of conversions
• doing what a client tells you to do without considering any long-term implications
• not tracking website conversions at all
• adding pages of content while disregarding website structure or architecture
• not finding other websites that may have duplicate content sprinkled around the Internet
• not clearly understanding a client’s goals or expectations
• focusing on one metric as the decisive measure of marketing success or failure
• not understanding how SEO and SEM fits within a business’s marketing
• focusing too heavily on off-site or on-site optimization elements
• not understanding the newer online marketing mediums and how they fit in with traditional SEO like SMM (social media marketing) and OIM (online identity management)
• starting work on a website haphazardly with insufficient data driving your assumptions and conclusions 

Examples of the Foundation SEM philosophy are:

• clearly understanding a client’s marketing goals
• clearly understanding why a client is requesting what their requesting
• not blindly following a client’s suggestions to simply feed the animal
• considering a variety of alternative marketing paths before finalizing a strategy
• clearly understanding the client’s expectations
• keeping up to date on broad and developing marketing techniques
• thinking about how each individual idea or implementation fits within the larger marketing schema
• tracking a wide range of metrics and having a sizable starting block of data to work from

Foundation SEM is a thought process in approaching marketing challenges. Every action taken on behalf of a client should be considered among the framework of wider goals and expectations. It might take a little more time and due diligence, but the long term effects can be nothing less than dramatic.