My work life straddles design and marketing, and corporate vs. small-business approaches to each. And I’m seeing a lot of variation in how people understand and advocate for SEO strategies.

I see larger businesses with a team of marketing specialists are leaning past plain-old keyword optimization. I personally suspect that they were led in this direction by their lust for Flash and dynamic page technologies that cloak content and disorient spiders. And now that bots can better read Flash, along comes Silverlight; the jury is out on the future of rich-media page readability.

So, to compensate for having hard-to-search pages, and relying on incumbency and in- and outbound links, larger companies have tended to focus on e-mail campaigns and the links they provide, and on social media rather than keywords. The meme I’ve heard is that “keywords don’t matter anymore” or, better articulated, “you’re better off focusing your efforts on social media now.”

And there are many examples of companies doing very well with this stuff and engendering very positive grassroots PR for themselves. Here’s a glowing post about Lands End, who clearly has staff dedicated to responding to Google Alerts or whatever.

In contrast, smaller companies with modest resources and a culture of DIY, are very heavily biased toward keywords and set-it-and-forget it approaches. Their instinct is to stuff their header tags with keywords and pay for inclusion in directories rather than spend time, say, blogging. As nonincumbents with simple websites, these small businesses can achieve surprisingly good rankings with well-done on-page keyword-driven SEO. In fact, one of my clients is #1 for Favorite Seattle Caterer.

I see a big digital divide which in some ways serves each type of business well, yet leads each to miss some key opportunities for development. Microsoft, for example — having long ago dispensed with a reliance on keywords — has a site heavy on jargon that can very, very hard to get to the bottom of.

Microsoft Expression Studio takes your creative possibilities to a new level. The professional design tools and innovative technologies in Expression Studio give you the flexibility and freedom to bring your vision to reality—whether you are designing standards-based Web sites, rich user experiences for the desktop and Silverlight, or managing digital assets and content.

What is this stuff, and what does it do?!

— Abigail

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Abigail Hamilton (Candyhog) is a professional with over a decade of experience in small business, enterprise, and business-to-business design and marketing. She loves writing for the Web, creating and maintaining brand identities, and working with clients to meet their goals.

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