Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Unlike most Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) analysts, I have a background as an editor and proofreader — I don’t have a marketing or technical background.

I think of a Web site as a book. Each book is made up of pages of words – words that the search engines need to see and words that will get you what you want, whether it’s buyers, members, or subscriptions. Sure, there are pictures in the book, but what makes or breaks your site is the words, and I LOVE words.

Editors look at the world differently. I find some perverse pleasure in finding typos in articles in The Washington Post. It secretly delights me to give a red-marked page to a coworker. When I drive past the tire place that offers “wheel alinement,” I imagine dropping a friendly note in the mail.

I spent the first 10 years of my professional career editing and proofreading. The work varied, from the National Captioning Institute, where I transcribed and edited prerecorded video to a particular “words-per-minute” rate, to Elias, Matz, Tiernan, & Herrick, a corporate law firm that demanded accuracy in every number within hundred-page financial documents.

After a stint in central Virginia, where, as an artist, I ran my own business web site, my park ranger husband moved us back to Northern Virginia, and, after settling in at Mason Neck State Park in Lorton, I decided to try something different. I joined NetStrategies.

With the experience I had running my own web site and seeing how small changes make big differences, something just clicked in my head with SEO and usability. After discussing my interest with Company President Rodney Loges, I began working with the marketing department putting together suggestions for customer sites.

Early in my SEO work, I had a conversation with NetStrategies’ Director of Technology, Robert Moses. As we analyzed a customer’s site and shared insight on the best strategies to optimize that site, I commented that, “It all seems like common sense!” Robert agreed but pointed out you “have to be able to think that way to get it right.”

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a Web site to increase the number of qualified visitors from search engine organic results. That’s how I see it – get those qualified visitors to your site, so they buy, join, or subscribe.

I absolutely love the process of search engine optimization – to see what happens when we help a customer with their site. Yes, their site usually comes up higher in the rankings, but more importantly, they see an increase in their customers, members, or subscriptions. They get measurable results from their investment in Internet marketing.

With our phenomenal tech, marketing, and customer service departments, we optimize each site as a team. Working with NetStrategies doesn’t just get you an outsourced SEOer. It also gets you an analytics specialist, a technical specialist, and a PPC specialist. Our team members don’t plug away to kill eight hours. We love what we do, and that makes a difference in our performance.

I still take regular training, am a certified eMarketer, and read countless books and blogs on SEO. I’ve learned a lot in my tenure as an SEOer. Join me as I share tips, tools, and books to help you in your own SEO efforts. I look at SEO from a different angle than a tech or marketing person, but that angle is a good angle. I’m Stacey Morgan Smith, the Director of Search Engine Optimization for NetStrategies, and I may be an editor by training, but I’m an SEOer at heart.

NetStrategies is an Internet marketing optimization company. Their performance command center is the first of its kind in the industry. This fully integrated approach uses a unified marketing dashboard that incorporates best-of-class Internet marketing tools, certified expert marketers, and real-time monitoring of opportunities and threats to each customer’s Internet marketing efforts.