Cartoon and Mainstreaming SEO | Vertical Leap Blog

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Sun, 05 Jul 2009 by Matt Hopkins

I was reading a number of my daily blogs this morning and came across this great cartoon:

This is another example of how mainstream SEO had become. Over the past few years, you have even seen newspapers/journalists ensure that keywords are embedded into their stories to help boost rankings (sometimes to the detriment of the news story). Most [if not all] bloggers also push keywords into their blog posts. Any web designer worth their salt will make some attempts at some keyword placement.

The only problem I see with people writing about “SEO becoming mainstream” is that they don’t seem to really understand what is required themselves. They still believe it is about meta tags, keyword stuffing, and the like. This is frustrating to those of this in the industry as it perpetuates the myth.

SEO is not rocket science – no one says that it is. But when the search engines are using more than 150 different attributes to determine ranking results in their algorithms it requires a bit more mental dexterity than placing a few keywords in the title of your blog.

The truth is that SEO is about building authority. That is our ultimate purpose – helping our clients achieve an authority status for their chosen keyword “universe”. When we do this, the high rankings will follow. Keywords on a page – yes, part of the process; but an ever diminishing part these days.