Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog

Chapter 7: The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded

By Rand Fishkin

Editor's Note: Since this post was originally published (on The Moz Blog in July of 2011), the responsibilities of an SEO have increased, and they vary from job to job and project to project more than ever. As Rand has since stated, the job of the SEO is to figure out how to drive traffic to a website that will achieve the marketing goals. It is not based on what anyone thinks the job of an SEO is. Period. One might say that is true of the SEO's job title, as well.

When I started out as an SEO (circa 2003), the job responsibilities weren't easy, but the list was relatively short. Over the next five years, those responsibilities increased, primarily in tactical and knowledge areas. A 2003 versus 2008 rundown might look like this:

The last two and a half years, however, have brought about substantive changes in our field. We're facing large-scale, industry-shifting trends that have upset the classic model for search engine optimization, including the following:

• Search engines favoring brands over smaller, lesser-known sites. This is the result of Google's Vince update and similar search algorithm updates.

• The release of Panda. Panda has changed what it means to do SEO, just as the Florida update did at the end of 2003.

• The shift in web user behavior toward social media. More than 20 percent of the time ...