There’s a little bit of confusion as to whether SEO and internet marketing is an art or a science. It is actually more science than art, because there is a systematic way to go about acquiring traffic and generating buzz for a website and product. Only thing required is that a person understands the basics and knows what tools to use.

SEO Basics: SEO is more about a better visitor experience, and figuring out ways to attract new visitors. From this viewpoint, it needs one to be an expert in a specific sector or field that the site caters to, rather than an SEO expert. All that really needs to be done is to be aware of the Google guidelines outlined in its webmaster section, and use a suitable platform like Wordpress for a blog or joomla for a site that needs a robust CMS.

Keyword Tools: The first thing that any SEO campaign needs is a list of relevant keywords to work with. Everything that comes after that is based on one of the keywords in the list, so it is of utmost importance to do this the right way. The best keywords are those which have high query volumes and are being consistently bid on by the site’s potential competitors.

An expert in SEO will be able to come up with a nice list of keywords without any help. But it works better, and is more scientific, to use a keyword tool. The most popular one is from Google, which generates keyword suggestions for Adwords users. There are many more, though, that work just as well, including Wordstream and SpyFu.

Onsite Optimization: The onsite optimization process essentially involves focusing the content on each page to match a specific keyword. Keywords in page titles and URLs matter a whole lot. Within the page content, the presence of keywords has to look natural and should not break the flow of the narrative. New landing pages can be created to target each keyword.

Other things that help include using the right platform and/or CMS so that it can automatically produce the required titles, URLs and optimal internal linking structure, which is a good strategy for all Internet marketing practices. Design and back-end scripts can be optimized by using the right fonts and graphics, and a better hosting server that speeds up page loading time.

Link Building: Incoming links are pretty important, as far as search algorithms are concerned. What a link building campaign does is work with the keywords and content creators to acquire targeted links for each page, based on the keyword. The essence of it is to reach out to and establish relationships with like-minded and important website owners. The actual transaction needs a certain amount of experience, so unless the webmaster is aware of terms like three way link deals or sitewide links, it is better to get a professional to do this.

Analytics: Without a good way to analyze traffic, it’s hard to tell whether or not the site is going in the right direction. A good analytics script will offer everything from source referrals to keywords used, landing page data, demographics information about visitors and the time they spend on specific pages. Even more important is the ad clickthru information and conversion data, which highlights pages and ads that are doing well.

To sum it up, SEO and internet marketing does not require a magic wand. There are things that one learns by experience, and others that can be done using tools and scripts. But the bottomline is that it’s still about talent, hard work and a solid product/service.

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