The marketing landscape has evolved over the years. New techniques and ideas are constantly changing and unpredictable. Internet marketing is a whole new division of marketing and is one of the most – if not the most important – marketing campaign. With the rise of the new generation of kids, the print medium is slowly fading and to get a message across requires some sort of screen to display your messages. One of the very basic ideas of internet marketing is SEO. If you don’t know what SEO stands for, it’s one of the most important aspects of internet marketing.
Why is SEO so important?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The main idea of SEO is to help drive traffic to your website using a variety of words and links. Want to be one of the top searched for websites? SEO is one way that can help you achieve that. SEO is a “silent” way of branding a website/product without having ads and pop-ups or be generally annoying when driving traffic online. Creating specific keywords in specific blog posts or in descriptions can help make your website more visible than it ever was. Best of all, it’s a free way of getting traffic to a website.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing provide a list of websites and videos closely related to the terms or phrases searched for. Search engines gather information from every website to help people search relevant information from the recommended websites. Each engine has an algorithm of its own on searching keywords and phrases and ranking websites from best to unnoticed.
The problem about the internet landscape is no one is sure what they are looking for. A person searches a term or phrase, checks a couple websites and if they are not satisfied, then they search some more by plugging-in a new term or phrase to search and check another set of websites. People rinse and repeat until they have gained the relevant knowledge they seek. SEO is specialized on how people search certain keywords and phrases and is the key of beating out your competitors in the already crowded digital space.
A Few Tips on Applying SEO
Words are the most powerful tools not only in SEO, but also internet marketing in general. Without having specific titles and keywords, a website could be buried underneath thousands of other websites and therefore making the website useless. Having specific titles, keywords, and/or phrases helps search engine algorithms to find your website more commonly and thus raise the rankings of a website, which ultimately brings the website closer to the first page of search results (which is every sites goal).
Another importance for keywords and phrases are for material containing no words at all. Material like pictures, flash animations, and videos don’t have a specific way to display words except through coding and “attaching” a certain keyword or phrase helps make the content searchable for viewers.
Another way of using SEO, are through external links. External links are like “suggestions” from other websites and users and helps bring in more traffic to a website. The more external links are associated to a website, the more it will be recognized by the search engine and thus rise in ranking. However, there are some tactics others may try and take advantage of by buying or putting fake external links and linking it back to the website, fool the search engine’s algorithm and increasing the popularity of the site. But many – if not all search engines – have a counter for this behavior and flag any website that uses this kind of procedure.
Lastly, a reputation must be built to also help increase traffic and rise through each search engine’s ranking. A consistent flow of fresh, new, and exciting content and external links will not only bring in new visitors, but also lets search engines acknowledge the website’s reputation and let it rise through the ranks.
Advantages of Using SEO
Many tools are available, such as Google Analytics, to track SEO information on a website. This gives you more of an insight into what your customers are looking for or the general internet public. The data and metrics from these tools are invaluable and help you increase traffic even more once you are more familiar with SEO and the tools at hand.
These are a few basic ideas and tips on what SEO does for a website. There are a number of ways to get SEO to play into a website’s favor and gain a reputation. However, the tactics are constantly changing. SEO is an ever-changing landscape. What might work today, may not work a week later. The changes can occur quickly, but understanding the basics of SEO can go a long way.
