SEO and marketing are two different things. Yes, they go together and SEO can be considered part of the Internet marketing, but when it comes to comparing the two they are very different. And it is important to understand their differences in order to avoid doing stupid things.
SEO is a very technical process. There’s one goal, you have to rank high in search engines. It doesn’t matter how you do it, and in a nutshell goes down to one thing – getting a load of good backlinks.
Marketing on the other hand is a very delicate process. It’s a whole strategy from start to finish and how you do it will decide if it’s successful or not.
Let me give you a classic example – the forums. In case of SEO, all you need from the forums is getting your signature out there and making as many posts as possible. The quality of posts doesn’t really matter, all you have to do is dump a load of fluff posts and as long as they stick you have backlinks.
If you try doing that as a marketing strategy, you’re screwed. To use forums for marketing you have to make quality posts and establish yourself as an expert without even having links in the signature to begin with. You have to appear that you know what you’re talking about so that people know to go to you with their problems. That’s when you plug in your link and get highly targeted traffic and prospects which is basically the entire community.
You see how different they are? I always say that web 2.0, forums, social networks and similar sites are supposed to be used for marketing, not SEO. The links aren’t that good at all if you just dump them in there and you’re nothing but a spammer doing so.
Thanks for reading!
