How This Is Achieved
Every business that wants to be visible to people that are searching for products, information and interesting content needs to be optimized. There are several different ways that come together and different companies have different strategies that may rely on one area slightly more or less than another’s.

Physically optimizing the website so that it not only looks good to your audience but also is easily processed by the robots that search engines use to review your website and gather information. Presenting this information so it is easily identified and optimizing it to best advantage is a relatively simple process that relies on experience and understanding the current best practices for website development.

Enhancing Your Content
There have been many ‘tricks’ used to try and maximize the advantage that content has when it is looked at by search engines. The best search engine optimization companies have never tried to do this instead have used quality content that is interesting to site visitors with enough optimization to positively affect how search engines rate the site while not affecting the information content and readability of the site.

Backlash
The last couple of years have seen a huge backlash against inappropriate SEO techniques that have seen many businesses damaged through losing their page ranking. This was caused because the major search engines were finding that people searching were becoming dissatisfied that they were not getting results that they were looking for.

This move continues and businesses and organizations that have used proper SEO techniques and provided quality content are reaping the benefits. It has also help make search engines the number one way that people find out information about products and services.

Quality content provides a great basis to extend marketing from search engines to social media and blogs. This raises an organizations profile and creates a network that helps to direct interested people to your website.

Google has long maintained a weird relationship with the practice of link building. Originally they considered it white-hat, then they kind of informally shifted it into the grey-hat area, and today they consider it strictly black. If you artificially create a link — any link — for money, you’re violating the Internet’s Terms of Use as far as Google is concerned. Which is ridiculous, and they know it, but they have to maintain the illusion that the competition for the first few slots on their SERPs isn’t rigged by SEO companies.

Why? Because their claim has always been that the SERPs show users what they most want to see — not what some other company has engineered into position.

Fortunately, the best SEO companies out there know the secret to success under today’s Google laws: “all” you have to do is make your client the page that people want to see. That’s why SEO has become this strange agglutination of reputation management, advertising, social media, and so on — because the best optimization these days isn’t link building, it’s market positioning.

Of course, it’s silly to think that every new startup that hits the market has a unique position. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there whose business concept really is “do exactly what did, only later and in a more saturated market.” Those people shouldn’t ever be at the top of the SERPs, because really, who wants to see another clone of something they’ve already been offered elsewhere?

So what does an SEO company do with a client that clearly doesn’t deserve a spot in the SERPs? They build them a spot in the SERPs anyway — even if it means working with the company until they’ve solidified a position in their market that wasn’t what they expected at first. Just another thing on the long list of things the best SEO companies have to do.

In other words, the best search engine optimization companies around offer marketing as an SEO service.

Every advertisement you create is, in the eyes of an SEO company, a piece of content. And every piece of content you create can, in the eyes of a marketing company, act as advertising. Panda and Penguin obliterated a vast swath of non-content-oriented SEO practices, and among the leaders in content-based SEO, Content Marketing is the obvious choice.

Seriously, the other option (having someone create content that is used strictly for backlinks without any consideration to whether or not people actually want to read) is insanity. If you’re going to put the time and effort into having content created in the first place, why would you pay $.01/word to someone who burly speak English and get just the backlinks when you could double that, pay for a native English writer, and get content that will motivate people to buy in addition to the backlink?

Yes, SEO and marketing today are in fact largely one and the same. Well, there are clearly still lots of offline marketing firms who know nothing of SEO, but trying to find a high-quality SEO company that doesn’t also have a few marketing experts on staff is becoming an increasingly unlikely task.

In the eyes of the consumer, this should be considered a good change, for one simple reason: great content never gets Google slapped by some minor algorithm change. It never gets sandboxed. It will never become ‘grey hat’. Great content is the ultimate evergreen resource; chase it or eventually, whatever else you’re