What Is Search Engine Optimization

Filed in archive Blog Marketing on January 4, 2010

Frequently, search engine optimization (SEO) comes as an afterthought, and not everybody is always fully aware of its long-term benefits. Depending on the situation, SEO can affect both the IT and marketing departments. In a small business, only one (or very few) individuals will be doing everything. Other times, companies will hire specialists to help them with their SEO needs.

SEO can be defined as an aggregate of all the work required to produce a high volume of referral hits from search engines, web directories, and other websites, with the ulti- mate goal of making the website popular. SEO involves internal and external website analysis, including link building, proper website architecture and development, competitor analysis, keyword research, content development, and many other tasks.

SEO is partly about building appropriate content and partly about getting people to link to you. Your content is crucial, but Google's ability to count incoming links, in addition to content, was considered a major breakthrough.

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the utilization of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising such as through Google AdWords. Although some elements are common to both SEO and SEM, PPC advertising is much easier to implement and can achieve immediate results, usually in the form of getting visitors to see your website in a matter of minutes.

Marketers will often ignore (or confuse) SEO in favor of (PPC) SEM, but by doing so they are ignoring great opportunities. SEO is about as close to free as you can get. It takes work, and work costs money, particularly if you hire a consultant. But you won't have any advertising bills coming in. SEO work brings long-term value.

If you operate your website for hobby or profit, SEO can be an significant tool in making your website popular. SEO is not rocket science (or anywhere close to it). But it certainly can get as technical and detailed as you want to make it.
One could argue that the deceptive SEO practiced in its early days is long gone. Nowadays it takes a lot more effort for sites to be ranked well. Ranking well does not necessarily translate to relative site popularity or sites meeting their objectives (desired conversions). SEO gets the visitor to the door. It is up to your site's content to welcome
and retain that visitor.

Optimising just for search engines may not be enough. Social media websites along with social bookmarking should be considered as well. Today's web user demands more from websites. This evolution in site usability and interactivity, coupled with ever-changing search engine technology, brings with it additional demands for the website owner.