One very important realization for me in this last week has to do with our obsessive need as humans to name, label,  and compartmentalize anything we come in contact with, all while simultaneously connecting these concepts with our preexisting notions.  This process is the foundation of how we learn.  I think of the tagging, meta tagging, categorizing, and tracking on this site alone, as an example of how we interact with and change the web, essentially leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find our way back or to allow others to follow.  (Of related interest actually, a news story released this week said that scientists believe that our use of technology, specifically the internet, is actually evolutionarily changing our brains and how they function.) Links within our minds and links on the web are powerful tools for helping us find our way.  But what does this mean for marketers?

Well, search engine optimization (SEO) itself is not a new concept.  Dating back even before 1996, the use of tags within code and counting links to determine placement on search engines were just two ways that early websites ensured users could find them.  Granted there were not as many sites to search in 1996 (Yahoo indexed over 19.2 billion individual webpages in August 2005 by comparison), the huge growth in the number of sites has created an environment where even more sophisticated (though in some ways simpler) approaches to SEO have been born.

One of these approaches relates back to my opening point about “connecting concepts to preexisiting notions”.  It is not enough for the marketer or site developer to ask themselves “What words or phrases best describe my product, service, or site?”, they must also ask “What preconceived words or phrases will my customers come to the search engine with?”  Because really, all the tagging, labeling and categorizing on the web is generated by the connections that already exist in our minds.  A self-perpetuating circle is born and reborn daily as users search what are to their minds learned and logical terms and site developers then use tools like Google Adwords: Keyword to determine which search terms are most popular.

The recognition of this cycle also supports the assertion that it is more important than ever before for marketers and site developers to not compartmentalize themselves, but work together to create full customer profiles and design and optimize e-sites that meet the needs of those customers.  In this way, we are all building the world wide web together.

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