SEO campaigns need to focus on more than just page optimization. Expand your scope of expertise to keep clients at the top of search results pages.

Search engine optimization has been growing up and dragging online marketers along with it. Lately, in order to be successful, an SEO campaign needs to focus on more than just page optimization. With a finite amount of search engine traffic everyday, there is a limit to how many people can be reached and how high a site can rank. To increase their share of this traffic, search marketers are starting to explore alternative ways to get their clients more involved in the online mix. In short, SEO practitioners are stepping up their game, and I predict a trend of search marketing departments evolving to keep up.

In some industries, paid search is becoming increasingly expensive and competitive. With so many clients vying for the same coveted keywords, pay-per-click costs are rising. In search of a cost-effective method to reach online users, clients are starting to request additional services to drive traffic to their site. In response, SEO practitioners are starting to expand their scope of expertise to keep their clients at the top of search results pages.

Why SEO needs to continue to expand
As the internet continues to evolve and additional platforms are created, SEO departments will begin to follow suit. It is extremely important and effective for SEO strategies to start where the online conversation originates. Right now a large amount of people still have search engines as their homepages, but users are in the process of shifting gears. More and more people are accessing the internet through social networking sites because that is a key component of their web experience. The industry has already seen the change from browser-based to search engine-focused usage when people started logging online to do more than just check email. Google has recognized this trend with its incorporation of tools like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Photo. Yahoo continues to embrace its origin as a portal, but it has increased Web 2.0 offerings with tools like Yahoo Buzz and Pulse, a social shopping platform. With this current transition, "SEOers" are joining in and adding a social, user-generated content (UGC) and Web 2.0 focus to their optimizing efforts.

Blended search and subject matter experts
With the advent of blended search, search engine marketers are starting to look beyond the text of a website to images, video and audio content. A side effect of expanding their definition of content is that search engine marketers are becoming more active participants in the online conversation on behalf of their clients. By moving beyond pull marketing strategies to interactive branding initiatives on social networking and bookmarking platforms, a number of SEOers inadvertently ended up on the cutting edge of emerging Web 2.0 trends.  

Link building has gotten harder as site owners have gotten savvy and stingy with their linking, and as a result, search marketers had to resort to other tactics in search of links (blogging, blended content efforts and maybe even begging). Another byproduct of this expanded purview is that SEO practitioners have become subject matter experts on an extremely wide array of interactive topics. To create inbound links, search marketers are creating link-worthy content on blogs, UGC sites and video aggregators all in the hopes of generating interest and links. By spreading viral videos and Digg'ing like there is no tomorrow, SEO professionals are creating organic traffic for clients. That is traffic stemming from an aggregator, social site or blog, as opposed to paid efforts like pay-per-click or banner advertisements.