One of the things I like about SEO is that the impact of your efforts are measurable. However, there are a few situations that make measurement more of a challenge than you’d expect at first blush.

For example, when: organic traffic and paid search traffic isn’t correctly segmented; conversions aren’t being captured (or the site doesn’t have any traditional conversion points); and the time between an organic visit and a conversion is so great that the two are hard to correlate.

Talk to any SEO who has been evaluating sites for a while and eventually they’ll mention Xenu for its ability to quickly crawl a site and provide the foundation for a site evaluation. I, too, am a fan, but I’m an even bigger fan of Link Examiner. The feature list of both tools is too long to describe, so let’s focus on the important differences from an SEO’s point of view.

SEO, paid search, social media, analytics, display advertising, affiliate marketing, user experience optimization…the list of practices under the search engine marketing umbrella goes on and on. But it’s not always easy deciding which of these to engage in.

SEOs around the world watch the search engines like a cast of preying hawks. What will Google do next and how will the algorithms change? What can I do today that will get me ranked higher tomorrow?

But is this really the right approach? Is it best to follow the search engines and adapt to the changes they make?

I was fortunate enough to present at Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2009 earlier this week. Sure, I’ve done presentations and training sessions with prospects and clients, but those have an entirely different vibe.

In my last post, I went over the importance of targeting real people over search bots to achieve long-term results. And just last week, news in the SEO community presented a perfect example of what I was talking about – the nofollow link debate.

At the core of Keyword-Driven Marketing is the idea that a keyword represents a customer. In the online space, if you trace back the steps of a customer all the way to their initial interaction with a search engine, you’ll see the purchasing cycle begins with the entering of a keyword into a search box. The difficult part is determining what keywords future customers will use.

Social what? Marketing, media, networking, syndication…one’s head is easily set spinning by the type of jargon we throw around these days. And where are we now, Search 2.0, 3.0, 4.0? Does it even matter? It’s time for a comprehensive cheat sheet.