Search Engine Optimization Basics: What Every Marketer Should Know

Search Engine Optimization of SEO is a topic of great interest but also of great confusion to most small businesses and marketers. The importance of being found by customers and clients when they search for your services on Google or Bing is greater than ever before. Without things like a phone book yellow pages, with the increased use of mobile devices (smart phones, tablets) and with the flood of information available to everyone, if you can’t be found by the search engines you will likely not stay in business for very long. Also, since advertising is extremely cost prohibitive for most small or even larger businesses, the appeal of SEO as a tactic for attracting customers is significant.

Simply put, SEO relies on making a connection (in the form of relevance) between the content on a webpage and the search terms used by a user of any of the search engines. Although we will discuss in detail the specifics of how this actually works the basics of SEO are simple. Relevance can be thought of like this: if you are having a conversation with a friend and want to know where you can find the best pizza in town and your friend starts talking about the best broccoli in town you would consider your friend to not be very attentive to what you were asking them about and would deem the information they told you as irrelevant. Search engines weed out irrelevant, meaningless, non-useful information in much the same way we do in the offline world.

Using our pizza example, you might a.) first go to a more qualified friend to ask them about the best pizza, perhaps someone who you knew had deep knowledge about pizza or at least Italian cuisine b.) be more specific in asking about pizza places, you might ask what is the best pizza restaurant in your zip code or nearest to your house or pizza that is priced inexpensively. These are all specific questions you might ask to get the best answer possible to solve your problem or satisfy your curiosity.

Google and other search engines try their best to be that most informed friend who wants to give you the best possible answer to your questions. SEO is simply using well defined techniques and tactics established and documented by Google and the other search engines to get your content to a.) answer peoples search queries and b.) result in being the most visible to people seeking that information. So when you break it down in this manner it doesn’t seem so daunting now does it?

Well like anything else, if SEO were that easy everybody would be doing it. Although putting SEO into practice is easier said than done, especially for busy entrepreneurs, salespeople or marketers, with a little bit of help establishing a framework and implementation plan, it can be done and produce the kinds of results that produce a dramatic increase in website visits, leads and sales conversions for your business.