Advanced marketers pretty much know the role that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has to help drive traffic to a site, yet a lot of average people making efforts to market their website do not necessarily have a full grasp of SEO. Therefore, this shall be "SEO 101" to provide the average person with a better understanding of what SEO is and what it does.
Wikipedia defines SEO as:
"The process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results."
Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.
Optimizing your website for search engines is a methodology that utilizes certain techniques so that search engines can read and determine the relevance of a page (based on the keyword or keyword phrase that is being searched for). In other words, search results of keywords and keyword phrases bring up websites, based on the relevance of keywords and content of those website pages.
There are a variety of methods for doing this:
One technique for optimization uses keywords in hidden "meta data" within the code of the web page that Meta data consists of metatags (a tag line for title, description, keywords) and other tags, such as alt tags to add keyword description on images, tables, etc.
Another technique for optimizing a web page uses keywords within the page content in headers, hyperlinks or cross linking (links between pages of the same website), styling, and frequent content updates.
How pages are named is also an important SEO tactic. Web pages with URLs that contain keywords and keyword phrases increases the prominence of a page within search results.
Basically, in SEO, it's all about keywords and how they are used to improve relevance in search results. For example, if you were a pet store in Los Angeles and someone were to search for "pet stores Los Angeles", your website would probably come up in the search results if your site is properly optimized with that keyword phrase.
The leading search engines, such as Bing, Google and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results.
The thing is, your website might come up on page one or page 6 or deeper, whereas many people don't end up looking that far. The higher up (earlier) your website is, the more "web presence" your site has. So, how your site "ranks" (the earlier, or higher position on the search results page; how it ranks among others with the same keywords) is another important element in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or "search marketing" (SM).
Search Engine Ranking
As pointed out, SEO by itself does not improve search engine "ranking". Although it does aid in the search results of keywords and keyword phrases being search for, it isn't the factor that decides how your website ranks.
To rank higher up in the search results depends on another factor besides website optimization. And that factor is mainly based on "Link popularity". Link popularity has to do with "backlinks" (or inbound links from other sites to your site), particularly from "authority" sites (high ranking sites consisting of many web pages). Therefore, using methods to increase backlinks is another SEO tactic. And, to increase a website's link popularity, we move into using various search marketing channels.
Search Marketing
Search marketing (or inbound link marketing) utilizes various methods to help increase search result ranking. Wikipedia defines what this is well:
"It covers the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals."
Search marketing multi-channel communications include:
Blogging - writing optimized content in a Blog (web log).
social media marketing - integrated marketing communications to connect and engage with targeted markets.
article marketing - optimized articles submitted to a variety of article "hubs" or content centers that syndicate articles.
email marketing - a promotional campaign communicated via email
digital marketing - promoting brands using all forms of digital channels to reach customers (TV, radio, Internet, mobile, banner ads, outdoor digital, etc.)
affiliate marketing (for products) - rewarding affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.
press release marketing- optimized press release distribution on the Internet
Paid search advertising - a method of placing online ads on web pages that show results from search engine queries (such as using the Pay-per-click business model with Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, etc.).This method is a channel that uses keywords and keyword phrases for search relevance with a link to your website. In a way, this form of paid search is a "paid link".
Local directory or merchant marketing - a network of local businesses that combine a business listing and social networking to attract customers.
In all the above channels, the use of keywords and backlinks by internet and SEO marketers is predominately utilized.
In Summary
Good SEO can drive organic traffic to your website by utilizing optimization techniques, and may also involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, and building inbound links to your site. With the main purpose of SEO and SEM being to drive people to your website, it is important to make sure that, once they are there, that they take action. And improving your site's conversion rate is a topic for another article!
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