Virtually everyone who’s engaged seriously in the practice of search engine optimization has found it to have surprisingly versatile results. Site owners will often start out optimizing in order to rank for a particular term/phrase that’s relevant to getting customers, only to find that secondary and tertiary benefits from branding to reputation management to raw traffic all have an impact. Today I’d like to cover the different applications of SEO and talk about how to choose the right SEO objectives for your business.

Value-Producing Objectives for SEO:

SEO for Raw Traffic

Optimizing a site for search engines and creating keyword targeted content produces direct traffic from the engines, which typically expands into content sharing, direct traffic and referring links as more and more people find, use and enjoy the work you’ve produced. There are thousands of sites on the web that leverage this traffic to serve advertising, directly monetizing the traffic sent from the engines. From banner ads to contextual services like Google’s AdWords to affiliate programs and beyond, web advertising has become a massive ($25B+ according to eMarketer) industry.

via SEOmoz | The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business.