Is SEO really just another part of the marketing function?
What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimisation but that doesn’t really give you a good description of what it involves. Some people think it also includes buying clicks with something like Google Adwords or Microsoft’s Bing ad networks but that’s called SEM (Search Engine Marketing). So what is SEO?
Other people tell me that it’s all about how you use keywords around your website; in the page name and description, in the keywords that you target for each page and the words you use in the writing on your actual web pages and if this is true, then it’s up to the person who either writes your articles and or edits your website. Perhaps the best description of SEO comes from Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google who created an educational video about search engine optimisation.
Once you know what SEO is the real question is how do you perform the tasks of an SEO consultant. If you watch Matt’s video you’ll see that one of the SEO aspects he talks about is how well connected your website is, who’s connecting to it and who are you connecting to and you start to get an idea of the bigger picture that SEO is really about marketing your brand, building a network of websites that are relevant to yours and willing to put links on their website to yours. Does this sound familiar? It’s about building relationships and then building links on websites to confirm the relationships.
I recently met with Kristin from Sassy SEO and she re-affirmed my realisation that “white hat” SEO is about building relationships and building communities of interested people who are willing to recommend and interact about topics they are interested in. The larger the community the more relevant it is to the topic and one of the most important tasks in small business marketing is to make contact with the influential bloggers and let them you exist, build a relationship and then build a link bridge.
There’s another whole topic about “grey hat” and “black hat” SEO but we’ll save that for another time. Sometimes it is better to have fewer good quality links rather than lots of temporary spam like links. Stay tuned for more about SEO.
Watch a video about Search Engine Optimisation by Google Employee Matt Cutts and read about the online marketing and SEO services offered by 123ezy websites.