The key for every marketer – online and off – is to reach the market, or segment of the market, that most demands the products and services being offered. Is search engine optimization very good at reaching your market?

I think the definitive answer is a resounding “Yes!” Of course, SEO relies on a searcher inputting the right keyword or phrase before finding the page you have to offer. It’s pull marketing, not push marketing.

Pull marketing is a term that has come into being in the last few years and simply means that the marketer “pulls” his audience to him by sticking something out there – let’s say a carrot – and leading the audience back to him. How does SEO do this?

For starters, you can reach the right market if you know what the market is searching for. Are they looking for sneakers or tennis shoes? To some people, there may not be a difference, but to a marketer there is a huge difference. One type of person looks for sneakers and another type of person searches for tennis shoes. If you are prone to calling them sneakers in your day-to-day life then that is likely what you will call them when querying the search engine.

A savvy marketer knows to target the phrase that your searcher is going to use. Targeting “sneakers” will help you find one segment of your market; target “tennis shoes” will help you find another segment. But it’s the searcher who is finding you, not the other way around. With SEO you simply put the offer out there and the searcher jumps on it. It’s a lot like casting a fishing line into the water and catching a fish. The type of fish you catch depends largely on the body of water, weather conditions, and the bait you use. SEO is targeted marketing of a different kind.

Perhaps one of the most important principles in search engine optimziation is to ensure that each of your site’s URLs are crawlable and have good indexing power. That means ensuring the URL is one that is search engine friendly. It’s more challenging today to do this perfectly for several reasons.

Many sites now have grown to more than 10,000 web pages, making duplicate content a much more serious issue for many sites. Plus, the fact that many of these sites use session IDs and other dynamic URL capabilities, which drive the duplicate content problem up higher on the list of reasonable risks.

When you have that many pages and your site CMS creates dynamic URLs for each user and session then the issues become more sticky. That’s why Google has introduced the canonical URL tag. You can tell the search engine which web page to index just by adding the canonical URL meta tag in place on each of your web pages. When should you do this.

Ideally, it should be done early on, even before you build a dynamic e-commerce portion of your site. Normal html pages can use the canonical url tag as well. It won’t hurt them. That way, if you do grow into a monster website later then you’ll already have the canonical URL step done. No backtracking. For a more detailed overview of what the canonical url tag is and how it can be used, please visit the SEOmoz article here.

The discussion over search engine optimization or social media is pretty much dead. All online marketers today pretty much agree that both are necessary to maintain a full online and search engine marketing presence. To be successful at marketing yourself online you should pursue as many avenues as possible to keep your brand in front of consumers.

So the question is, how should SEO and social media work together for the betterment of your marketing?

There’s probably as many answers to this question as their are marketers. To be sure, there’s no one definitive way to use social media and SEO to market your business. But there are some simple principles to help guide you in your quest to dominate your niche.

1. Define yourself first. Develop a mission statement and USP and make everything you do work toward fulfilling those.
2. Don’t get sidetracked. It’s easy to do. You can locked into social media for hours and get nothing accomplished, or you can spend hours conducting keyword research only to come up with keywords that don’t really define what you do. Keep it focused.
3. Once you define what your business is all about, let SEO take the helm. Build your website around your core keywords and make social media play the supporting role in driving traffic to your website. Even if social media is your primary traffic driving source, it should focus in the direction of your core keywords, giving SEO the nod.
4. Re-evaluate periodically. You should conduct a self evaluation every month, but not extensively. Just check to make sure you are staying focused. But once a quarter, or every 6 months at least, you should conduct an extensive re-evaluation to ensure that you are staying true to your goals and to make sure that you don’t need to change directions – sometimes you do. Self evaluation is very important.
5. Connect with your market. The bottom line is you need to connect with the people you want to do business with. If you aren’t doing that then your SEO and social media campaigns will flop. Ask yourself, how best can I connect with my core market? When all else fails, ask your core market.

It’s no longer a question of optimization or social media? It is now, how can I use both SEO and social media to increase my share of the pie.

Apparently, someone thought it might be fun to run a Facebook poll asking whether President Obama should be assassinated. It turns out that 751 people responded to the poll; that is, they answered the question. That was before the poll was taken down.

Of course, now everyone in Twitterville and the Blogosphere are talking about it. Linking to this story, that story, and everything but the poll (because it was removed). But if it wasn’t removed, I’m sure it would be getting tons of links.

So, the question: Can offensive speech or inappropriate content be good for search engine optimziation? Unfortunately, online, you can draw links and get a lot of attention for all sorts of offensive behavior. Such links can potentially benefit you. But if you go around advocating assassinations and such then you are likely to bring upon yourself more trouble than the benefits are worth. Just a friendly reminder to think before you leap. Just because you have the technological capability to do something doesn’t mean you should.

Viral marketing has changed a lot over the years. In the early days marketers would write tons of articles and distribute them through article directories, attracting thousands of links in a few days. The reason this worked is because those marketers were able to write great articles that publishers didn’t mind printing. And they put their own links at the bottom in the author’s resource box. That was good promotion.

Other forms of viral marketing sprung up as we entered into the new millennium. Article marketing still works, but now viral marketers have blogs, video, social media, and a collection of friends built up from doing business online. Even ad networks can become a viral hit if done right.

The way viral marketing works, no matter which medium you are operating in, is you – the marketer – produce great content that gets people excited about something. It can be an innovation in technology, something funny or controversial, or anything that people will respond emotionally to. It’s got to have some kind of emotional appeal. That’s the attraction.

If you are really good at producing something with emotional appeal then people will link to it. They will also share it with their friends. Soon, it takes on the qualities of a virus and spreads on its own. Good viral marketing campaigns spread so fast you hardly notice it happening. That’s when you know you’ve done your job as a marketer and you’ve done something to be proud of.

Silly question, right? I mean, we just talked about link baiting. That’s SEO. But there is a basis for this question. As you know, other forms of marketing like social media and video marketing are on the rise. So is spam. And of course, no one likes a spammer. So the question begs to be asked: Will search engine optimization still be effective in a few years?

The Web is always changing. I do not think, however, that it will change enough to render SEO ineffective. Optimization, good quality, white hat SEO, will always still be effective. Bad SEO, of course, won’t. Spam won’t. Duplicate content won’t. Stealing content won’t be effective. But bad social media marketing won’t be effective either. That’s the beauty of marketing online. If what you are doing is bad, no matter what it is, it won’t be effective. Good marketing will be.

Still, there is an element that will always speculate about the future of SEO. Let your heart be still. Good SEO will still be effective years from now.

Link Bait is the practice of adding content to your site that draws an enormous number of natural links, which serve to push that page higher up in the search engines and therefore creating more opportunities to get more links. Is this practice manipulative? Is it is a good and white hat search engine optimization strategy? Will it always work?

OK, these are three distinct questions. I’ll answer them one at a time.

1. Is link bait manipulative? Yes. It is. In fact, just about everything you do online is manipulative in one sense or another. Optimization, by its nature, is manipulative. So, yes, link baiting is manipulative and that’s OK.
2. Is it good SEO? That depends on who you ask, but if you ask me then I’ll give an unqualified and resounding “yes”. Link bait is sound SEO.
3. Will link bait always work? I think so. The reason link bait works now is because it does the one thing that search engines thrive on. It is the creation of content that is so good that it draws natural links in very high numbers. The search engines love natural links. They don’t care if those links are developed in high numbers over a short period of time or over a long period of time. What they do care about is whether or not a website unnaturally builds links – that’s bad. But natural links gained using powerful SEO strategies are encouraged. Link bait is good and always will be.

The problem with link bait is that it is hard to pull off successfully. Hard, but not impossible.