What is SEO to you

[donford]

We define SEO, as search engine optimization.

Though it is more of an art. A web developer is not necessarily a SEO and vice versa.

In my job as a web developer I wear many hats, and often asked what exactly SEO is.

Before panda the seo industry seemed to follow "tricks" to get sites ranked. This practice lead to many seo company's thinking that spamming links, using link exchanges, link rings etc.. was actually the way to "SEO".

So now it seams SEO is simply a short word as to how to get your site in top results, thusly ignoring the actual definition.

As a web developer I always viewed SEO as a way to help the search engines understand what my web page is about.

What do you think SEO means to you and your company?

[mememax]

I think that SEO grew alongside the search engines. In the first period the SEOs were geeks programmers which tried to achieve top rankings spammin here and there. both internally and then externally.

Google seemed a machine to game to achieve your top positions. Now I think that Google helped a lot in giving to this job a further qualification. As they evolved their algo we evolved our knowledge in a game which is starting to move from the pure development to a larger integration with the marketing side of our job.

SEOs are everyday more marketing oriented, integrating a lot their job with pr building relationships with other webmasters. As you said I see SEO as an enhanced art where technical knowledge melts with marketing skills.

A good SEO is a marketing artist imo.

[donford]

Very good, good content, good useability. good ranking.. my thoughts

[SVmedia]

There's two sides to SEO.  Primarily, like you said it should be making improvements that help search engines properly crawl and idex the site.  On-page SEO is easy in sense, because the best practices are well established.

Off page SEO is where everything gets shady, way too many SEO companies automating link building, dummy sites with all scraped content, article spinners, the list goes on....
I just fixed up a site that an SEO company had been "building links" for over the last year.  The site didn't have keywords in the title tags, had tons of duplicate url issues, repeated content all over the place, etc.  Stuff like that just blows my mind, seen it quite a bit.Good SEO should be a solution based on what a client actually needs.  Most of the time they won't know, so it's on us to do our research and find out.  We need to research the niche, the competition, the whole 9 if we wanna actually provide value.

[mememax]

I agree with you, but what I really like of this job is that there is a base which everyone agrees on and then there is a shady part where everyone makes unique his job, there's a matter of knowledge + creativity.

For example the definition of good may be different from you and I and whatever other seo

[donford]

100% agree with the first side of SEO, great example of the dark side. Kudus

[TheeDigital]

Great question.  For a team that does both on-site SEO and off-site SEO we like to think ourselves as scientists.

We see things that most people don't ever see or even notice.  We are both creative and analytic, wordy and mathematical, dorks and geeks.

[MikeHarmanos]

What SEO is to me is a tool in the marketing arsenal.  That means optimizing the site to get the most value throughout the chain.  Choices abound.  What if getting ranked second instead of first means more profit for the business/client?

However, the non-SEO world thinks of SEO as "the way to get ranked first on Google."  That reminds me of the old South Park episode titled Gnomes.  You've seen it before with a slight modification...

1. Collect Underpants
2. SEO?
3. Profit!

I run away from this mindset as fast as possible any more.