Nearly every business has a website these days, but not every business has a good website. What separates a good website from a bad website? Search engine optimization. But what exactly does it mean to have your website “optimized”?
First, it helps to ask “What is SEO?” Simply put, search engine optimization is how you climb the search page rankings for your given topic. If you sell scarves, your name will appear in the search results page when someone searches for the word “scarves”. How high up the list it appears will depend on whether your page is optimized or not.
There are a number of different SEO techniques to help achieve this goal. An easily-memorized http address can help; instead of a long, random string of characters, a searcher (and a search engine, for that matter) will be more likely to remember a series of words, like www.marketing.com/SEO/techniques. Blogging is also one of the more popular SEO techniques, since a business website with a blog is can see over 50% more traffic than a site without one. Blogs can be optimized by including specific keywords that potential customers might search, thus making it more likely that a search engine will list your site higher when those words are entered into a search field.
However, there is a push these days to break from that particular model, moving away from keyword-driven content and towards more information-driven content. Marketers have found that the more engaging, interesting, and useful an article is, the more likely people will share it and link to it, which will increase their SEO. Similarly, social media consultants know how to use social media to maximize an online presence, even though recent changes to search engines seem to value social media links less than before.
Which begs the question: why spend time using SEO techniques that don’t appease the search engines? The answer is simple. Those search engines are what help us catch the attention of potential customers. If social media and blogging can do that more directly, without being necessarily “valued” by a search engine, then we still have achieved our goal. All the SEO techniques and Internet aids in the world—from h-tags to exchange server hosting to the search engines themselves—are designed to make a site easier to navigate, more useful, and more functional for flesh-and-blood users. That is now, and will always be, the goal of SEO. Read more here: etgroup.net