By Julie Johnson

The term SEO, or search engine optimization, is still an unknown to virtually everyone who doesn't work in that field. Most people have never even heard of the term nor know what it refers to. But the more interesting part is that even within the SEO industry, not everyone agrees on how best to approach the problems SEO sets out to solve.

Most everyone does agree on basic guidelines though. Guidelines like high site content, receiving and giving inbound and outbound links, proper meta tags and strong organization of the site. The problem is that there is no one formula that dictates the ratio or value of each of those things, so by its nature, SEO continues to be more of an art form than a scientific method. A good SEO provider is constantly juggling and balancing between all the factors as they carefully watch the movement of the website in the rankings.

Most professional SEO providers will provide their client a level of detailed in-depth report similar to one another. But that's where much of the similarity ends. While most will not have any outright conflicting advise, their content and their approach will be different. If you polled 10 providers for reports, you'd likely get 10 different versions.

This is the challenge for the SEO organization. There is no clear laid out plan that can be picked up and read like a book. There's no secret site that one can plug into and retrieve all the right answers. As every day at work is different, every company and every website is different. The interesting factor for the SEO provider is the suspense of not knowing immediately if their work is successful. Improved ranking and traffic take time to build and a successful SEO program will achieve that for the client.

Because things are changing so quickly with search engines these days, it takes a professional SEO organization to keep up with where things are going. For an individual to jump into doing SEO work on his own site would require a lot of time, and a lot of faith, and an extensive undestanding of SEO. There's a reason that some professionals have a great track record and others don't. It takes experience that can only be gained through a large client base. - 18098

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