Conversion Optimization and SEO. Know the difference?

well i think conversion ratio and SEO are 2 different unrelated things...

a good SEO will bring lots of visitors to your website
a good website will convert more visitors into customers

if you want higher conversion rate, forget about SEO (it's got nothing to do with SEO!), work on the design and content of your website

No doubt a few decent inbound high PR links

the first company we hired did great at SEO but zero CO. Every page read like it was trying to attract a search engine--stuffed full of keywords in odd places--made no sense to humans for the most part!

Ah, no. With Respect, but that is not the way SEO is performed. You have to optimize it, yes, but if you turn a site into search engine fodder, you are going to lose any and all clients or prospective clients because they would not want to be associated with someone that is clearly out there only to manipulate search engines. That can also have a really bad impact on your online reputation because if people can openly see that you are trying to manipulate search engines, what's stopping you from doing it in your own business? Even if you weren't responsible for optimizing it in the first place.

When you optimize a website, its to make sure its found in a search performed by prospective clients, and search engines alike. It has to be optimized primarily for visitors. Making sure that any content can be easily read and is not just one string of keywords one after the other, or even worse, leave a visitor wondering what language the site is written in and trying to load it into google translate to figure out wtheck is going on with it.

If anyone follows that method of optimization, you have my innate sympathies, because all that is going to do is kill your site (oh yes, Google in particular will ice your site faster than you can blink), but any prospective clients will simply go to your competitors, and that is if they can still find your site once google's gotten hold of it.

(/rant)

and its done that way why? i've learned one thing about the sales side of SEO for sure. There's alot of "this is how it works" that all SEO people seem to believe because apparently the great Budda of SEO spoke and said it was so and nobody ever challenged it. We got told for years by multple SEO people that "you have to build links over several years if you want to rise to the top of Google" give us 6 months or a year at 750 a month and you will slowly see progress. Finally I started looking at what they were doing and said "ok you do your thing but show me what it is as you go." Then I started jumping in an doing the leg work myself, claiming listings, locating directories and submitting to directories, using social media etc. And guess what? we built about 600 legitimate links in a couple months and rose to page 1. I learned what SEO guys really mean by "it takes months even years to build up" was "it takes that long because at the monthly rate we charge we only do a very limited amount of work each month."
Similarly, there's no reason why you can't add the 'call to action' instant email contact form or add an informative video or a FAQ to the front page while the site is still rising. To say you have to wait until the site reaches the top to start conversion optimization I disagree with. Lets face it, we know certain things are worth having.