From talking to clients and industry colleagues, it has occurred to me that the SEO discipline is unclear to some. Even though people are used to online campaigns, affiliate marketing, SEM and other online marketing channels, there is a lack of understanding in some businesses as to what SEO actually involves. So here is a basic overview of what it entails.  

What SEO is not

First of all, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is NOT a channel you pay for to get traffic to your website. You’d be surprised how many marketing professionals that buy traffic online think that SEO is probably similar to SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns where you buy traffic. Well, even though the disciplines are related, they are actually very different.

So what is SEO?

SEO is using techniques to gain a high ranking in search engine results for targeted websites. Optimizing a website for search engines involved four focus areas, two of which are on your website, and the other two are off your website.

• Technical on-page/on-site structure for search engines to be able to scan and index your website
• Content copywriting, keyword optimization (+ keyword identification), linking to internal and external urls (link to authority sources)
• Link building, how to identify authority websites, avoiding paid links, linkfarms and FFAs
• Competitive analysis, locating competitors and their ranking, competitor keywords

When optimizing for search engines, it is important to start from the top of the list, to have your website up and running, and optimized in the technical structure and content to be indexed well by search engines. An optimized website will rank higher once you go out and ‘build’ links to your website on external sites.

Why can’t I pay for SEO traffic?

Search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo try to establish credibility with their user base to deliver independent and relevant results to searches. If the results on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are paid, it can skew the results so that the advertiser with the biggest budget ranks highest in the search results. Therefore, the only way to pay for search engine visiblity is through SEM, where your ad is displayed in marked sections as sponsored links.

SEO benefits

• Organic search engine traffic is free. Even though you may pay a consultant or staff to work on SEO, the organic traffic that comes from search engines won’t cost you a cent. Besides, you pay for online marketingstaff already, don’t you?
• SEO has a long-term focus. It takes a long time to build links to your website from authority websites around the web, but once you have, you can reap the benefits. You *could* sit back and relax, but your competitors probably work on SEO as well, and there are new authority sites showing up constantly, so you need to keep working on SEO and set new goals even once you have reached high search engine rankings.

Add your thoughts

Do you have anything to add to the description above? Post your comments below. I’d love to hear you opinion.

Filed under: Search Engine Optimization
Tags:Definitions, SEO, Tips