Wading through cyberspace
Mankato’s SEOwhat.com helps clients gain visibility in the online arena
Margaret Steck
By Margaret Steck

Published: Thursday, October 28, 2010

Updated: Thursday, October 28, 2010 11:10

Katie Erickson, MSU Reporter
Catherine Seven, middle, sits with two employees at the SEOwhat.com offices in downtown Mankato. The small company offers a full online public relations service from behind a short bank of computers.

If you aren’t already aware, the Age of the Internet is upon us. As students graduate every semester and go on to bigger and better things with their professional careers, it is important that they know a thing or two about marketing online. Very few know this better than CEO of SEOwhat.com, Catherine Seven.

Seven, a Mankato native, got her start in the dot com business 12 years ago in Seattle while working with a start-up company that was selling advertising online. That was when her dream became a reality, but the dream became a nightmare after the dot com bust. Despite the fall, Seven didn’t give up on the Internet world. She took her knowledge and experience and created SEOwhat.com, located on South Front Street, in 2003.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the practice that makes websites search-engine friendly. The search engines pick up keywords by using a series of complicated algorithms, which allow their robots to “crawl” or “sweep” through the Internet and arrange search results according to relevance. It is Seven’s job to figure out how all of the search engine engineers think and how they want to optimize their sites.

“Google’s algorithms just changed about two weeks ago and I’m watching my Twitter feeds and I’m watching everyone flip out, but I’m not because the way we do things,” Seven said. “I do things the way Google wants them. At the end of the day, I am going by their rules and making sure we have links and good and fresh content and all the different anchor texts and variables that make up Google’s algorithms that make you have better rankings.”

Unlike some who conduct mass spams, have link farms (a group of websites that hyperlink to other sites in the group) and use other black hat SEO techniques, Seven and her staff only go by white hat methods that don’t try to deceive the system.

“Our rankings are going to take anywhere between three and six months before you start seeing results instead of three weeks because what we are doing is going to work and it is going to stick,” Seven said. “So when Google’s algorithm does change, you may drop a little bit because everyone drops when they shuffle their database, but you’re not going to see yourself completely gone all the way out. That’s the big difference between what I do and everybody else.”

SEOwhat.com’s business does not stop at search engine optimization. It also offers search engine marketing (SEM), social media optimization (SMO), press releases, consulting, web design and graphic design, making the business a one-stop-shop for marketing and public relations on the Internet.

“What we have been doing for the last seven years is taking a marketing firm or a public relations firm or agency and putting it online,” Seven said. “We do everything a PR agency would do for you here, but online.”

In this ever-evolving world, what we learn in class may not be what is being rolled out in today’s market. The key is to stay informed and continue to educate oneself in order to stay competitive.

“Use the knowledge that you learn in college, but still use reality as how you are going to get your career, because a textbook is only going to get you so far,” Seven said. “It’s going to give you the basics, it’s going to teach you how to take a left turn and use your turn signal, but it’s going to take your brain to be able to turn the wheel. You have to go forward in life with a mind that is open to change.”