What Exactly is SEO?
In my last post we discussed Website Optimization. The second of the four ‘legs’ of a successful-internet-marketing ‘stool’. Where your brand is the seat, these four ‘legs’ give your strategy stability:
- Social Media Optimization
- Website Optimization
- Search Engine Optimization
- Pay for Performance Advertising
In this post we’re going to speak about Search Engine Optimization. The tool you use to view websites on the internet is called a browser and the tool you use to find things on the internet is called a search engine. The four biggest search engines are Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Bing. Each search engine has its own set of rules to identify websites that match your request or search ‘query’. These rules are called ‘algorithms’ and while they are different for each search engine they have some things in common. They all use ‘web crawlers’ to crawl the internet looking for key words, key phrases and ‘metatags’ that match the search query.
So every page, every blog post, every digital press release, every image, logo and video need to contain key words, phrases and meta tags in order to be found by the search engines. Optimizing all of your content to be found by the search engines is SEO. If you don’t optimize all of your online content then you can’t be found as effectively. And if you don’t have enough original content you won’t stand a chance of climbing the rankings ‘organically’ or without spending money. The bottom line is that Search Engine Optimization, SEO is not difficult. It’s just time consuming. Once done though, and if you don’t have a lot of horizontal competition, your website should climb to the top of the search results. Your ability to create and manage a dialogue and then convert that discussion into a community and ultimately customers or fans is the subject of a future post.