What Is SEO?
What is SEO? SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, is basically the process of getting found on the internet. There are so so many websites being created each and every day, everybody is clamoring for traffic. SEO, increases a website’s visibility to those who are searching for products or information on the web.
SEO in a sense, lifts the veil on what people are searching for on the web. It’s particularly important to know what keywords people are using to find websites or services like what you offer. For example, “What is SEO?” could be a keyword in itself. So for digital marketing or SEO service providers, that would be a keyword you would want to write about. (Like I am now!) Likewise, SEO can provide a roadmap for your marketing team to get the right eyeballs on your products. This in turn, makes you money. That’s the bottom line for SEO, to increase organic traffic, so your on page conversion optimization turn them into customers!
SEO- Black Box No More
Historically, SEO has been sort of a “black box”, with clients knowing that they need it, but not really understanding what it actually is. No wonder, “What is SEO?” is such a popular keyword! Tactics have certainly changed over the years. It used to be that an SEO service could create “link farms” and point all these random links toward a site to artificially jack up their rank because lost of other domains were linking to the site.
Google became aware of this practice and updated their algorithm so it could detect that. Or it used to be common to just post a link to your site on a forum or random blog. Anywhere that you could get a link from another domain to your site. Let’s just say Google’s algorithm is getting pretty smart!
Today’s tactics focus on what Google calls “user intent”. In a nutshell, you basically need to create really quality content stemming from an SEO researched content marketing plan. Once you have the content, then you need to optimize it again, for clarity, sentence length, focus keywords, long tail keywords, title tags, meta tags, alt tags, structured data, and the list goes on!
In all honesty, the full optimization process can easily take a couple hours for one piece of content! So it could literally take you as long to optimize the content, as it did to write it! Crazy we know. But it takes all of these things to adequately answer that pesky question of “What is SEO?”.
SEO & Content Marketing
We’ve said this before, and I’m sure we’ll say it again. Good SEO in and of itself is beneficial for a website. To go in and update all the code, tags, description and the like to reflect industry best practices will help your site. And…the most benefit from SEO come from coupling SEO with content marketing. They go hand in hand.
You don’t want to create content just to create content. But creating content as part of an SEO targeted strategy, coupled with great on page SEO optimization, over the long term, will yield increased traffic. At least, that has been our experience. Integrating SEO and content marketing isn’t an up-sell for us, it’s good business. Because it’s what’s best for client over the long term.
We hope we’ve answered the question of “What is SEO?”, at least given you a better sense of what it takes. Good website optimization is not for the faint of heart, it takes time and energy! It’s definitely a marathon rather than a sprint. But the fruit of good SEO yields traffic that is yours to turn into customers.
