SEO Explained, Very Simply, For Amateurs
This article is going to lay out, once and for all, what the hell SEO stands for and means. This is strictly for the uninitiated, the dude with a website who is wondering why he spent a good amount of coin for a quality site that doesn’t seem to be getting any traffic, or the woman who has seen her business’s name drop from amongst the top Google pages to the 20th page and has been insisted upon by others that he/she must get going with this whole SEO business.
Sorting out what SEO Means to Everyone
Firstly, this means Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing your business’s site so that it places higher when you get searched for, or for general keywords related to the product you sell. This is generally done in two ways: organically, and through PPC . This latter example means paying Google to put your advertisement on all its various platforms, from the main Google search results page, or into GMail, or onto YouTube, embedded into videos now.
These are commonly known as AdWords campaigns and do differ in price. Google also takes care of a huge amount of banner ads on other sites. All of these things ought to been seen as classic advertising, only with the added advantage that you hit the customers who are desperate for exactly what you offer.
It’s like that old practice of taking out big ads in the yellow pages in your business’s section, only now it’s 2009 and the yellow pages aren’t exactly as relevant as they once were.
What is Paid Search?
All clear? A good SEO company will take care of your paid search, informing you how to run ad campaigns and sometimes creating your ads themselves. They’ll give you in-depth statistics (when you see the depth of Google’s analytics and the things you can learn from it, you’ll be amazed).
What Does Organic Search Mean?
So what about this organic search you’ve heard about? That’s all about reaching a nice, high rank in Google’s normal search algorithm. It happens with useful information, optimized code, and building rich, relevant links, plus a lot of other variables. Again, a good SEO company will do this for you, and fundamentally, will do it transparently.
There are dozens of methods to ‘game’ Google, and eventually they are all caught onto and banned. And the people doing them are placed on a kind of blacklist (hence the black-hat terminology you might see). So the SEO agency you choose needs to very consciously avoid engaging in those habits.
Search Engines are the New Ad Market of Our Time
Here’s how to consider SEO: they’re like an ad agency who swoops in, fixes up your brand to the point where it’s even more marketable (optimization), and then does the most direct targeting possible, and organically gets people talking about your product (hence the term organic search).
This isn’t so hard, is it? SEO is a loaded, jargon-y kind of place because that’s just how it developed, but then again, so is advertising. You only have to brush up on the basics and find a good SEO company, and you’ll understand why it’s not nearly as intimidating as it seems.
Why SEO is Fundamental
Consider SEO like a nice, new ad agency doing something more specific in a market that’s still finding its contours. Many of the old rules still apply, but as massive shifts are taking place when it comes to where people get their content and find business online, SEO is a fundamental topic to be aware of if you’re going to take full advantage of every business opportunity available to you online.
