Marketing Pilgrim

By Risa Borsykowsky

We live in an incredible age. Information is obtained at the speed of light. Ask me anything and I will find the answer right now. Long gone are the days when you’d have to blow a ram’s horn at the top of a mountain to send a signal. I can communicate with anyone right now. Anything I want to buy, learn, or compare - I can do it right now.

Our lives have been transformed by the Internet - an incredible knowledge base that contains every fact, product, invention, and concept ever recorded since the beginning of time. It enables, creates, and provides instant access to knowledge. It gives us the Power of Now.

There may be thousands of websites that contain the information that you seek, but only a handful will get your attention. These websites hold the power to influence and affect the way you make decisions. The people who deliver this knowledge to you are very powerful. These people are the SEO and SEM consultants.

Successful SEO/M consultants intricately understand the internet. They know what creates a buzz, how to create the buzz, how to keep the buzz buzzing, and how to influence people with the buzz. They know what people want, need, love, and crave. SEO/Ms have incredible power because they create and promote the websites that attract visitors. These websites rule e-commerce; they affect opinions; they rule the Internet. SEO/Ms make this happen.

Successful SEO/Ms don’t just have their finger on the pulse of the Internet; they create the pulse that is the internet. There are so many brilliant sites on the web that have penetrated my life and millions of others: Google, Ebay, Craigslist, Netvibes, Snapfish, MySpace, Zillow, Blogger, forums, blogs, news sites, cool tool sites, and so much more.

I remember the first time I performed SEO on a site a three years ago. I did one little thing – I changed the title tag of one of my client’s sites to include the keyword phrases we were targeting – “New York Caterers� and “Catering New York.� A few weeks later, the site ranked #3 for those phrases in Google and #1 in Yahoo. I just could not believe it. I so couldn’t believe it, I sent an email to Jill Whalen asking her how it could be that I got a site to rank #3 in Google when all I did was change the title tag. That was my first taste of SEO, and it was very powerful.

As a web designer, I know that a great web design won’t get much visibility without SEO/SEM. A site needs a pleasant design, great content, intuitive navigation, good usability, graphics, and cool tools to get people to stay and return, but it needs SEO and SEM to get found and thrive.

The Internet has transformed our lives by giving each person the power to make a difference – whether it’s by participating in an online community, or writing a blog, or creating a website with a cutting-edge way of getting something done, or a new way of presenting information to make a visitor’s experience more meaningful.

A great website with great SEO/M is a powerful combination.

[The above article is a submission for Marketing Pilgrim’s Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest. Each Monday in October, entries will be published and the most popular article of the week will qualify for the $5,000 grand prize. If you’d like to submit an entry, please view the contest entry-requirements and guidelines.]

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