Search engine optimization is not just a few industry keywords squeezed into a page of your website, SEO is truly a state of mind in today’s online business space. Five years ago you might have been able to recklessly drop a handful of keywords into your website and all of a sudden you would just start ranking and generating business but in 2011 you just can’t do that anymore. You really need to roll up your sleeves now because everything is about marketing now. SEO is a mindset that you have to embrace in order for things to work how they are supposed to. You have to be willing to integrate it into your business model rather than just have it as a line item for your monthly overhead costs.

Now it is all about taking your search engine marketing to the next level and really thinking outside the box. You have to be in a state of mind that really is open to all forms of search engine marketing. Your business has to eat, sleep and breathe ever form of communication the web has to offer. SEO is something much more different than it once used to be and it is important for business owners to realize this. It takes a very robust and multi-pronged approach to become not just visible online but successful online. As a website owner who aspires a great deal of website traffic you need to put yourself into the shoes of your website and really understand what it takes to market it correctly. Where does your audience hang out? What types of branding do they want to see? Search engine optimization is all about quality and not quantity and following strategies that were used years ago to just game the system now will only be detrimental to your overall search success.

Things that work now:

• Consistent content marketing
• Robust social media
• Wearing a marketing hat
• Quality blog post writing
• Laser targeted on & off site SEO/SEM efforts
• Making friends with industry bloggers

Things that don’t work:

• Anything with the word “blast” in it
• Jamming keywords into your website
• Rewriting the same article 100 times
• Thinking that SEO is all technical
• Adding 1,000 useless pages to your local business website

The most important thing to understand is that SEO/SEM is now more marketing than anything else. It is a type of marketing that has to 100% embraced because things take time and if you are not willing to give it time you will simply stall out.