Search Engine Optomization

 

The first time I heard about search engine optimization was from my dad. I was a junior in high school and he had started a business and was trying to give it a strong online presence. I haven’t given SEO much thought since then. But if I plan to have anything to do with social media in my career, it looks like SEO will be something I will need to know how to use. 

So what is SEO?

SEO helps businesses show up early in search results. Wikipedia defines SEO as “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results.”

Why does SEO matter?

Many business owners have realized the benefits of SEO. This is not surprising considering the following statistics from the Search Engine Journal:

-75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

-Search and e-mail are the top two internet activities.

-Inbound leads cost 61% lower than outbound leads. An example of an inbound lead might be from search engine optimization. An outbound lead might be from a cold call.

-A study by Outbrain shows that search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%

-SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.

-For Google, a study from Slingshot SEO shows 18% of organic clicks go to the #1 position, 10% of organic clicks go to the #2 position, and 7% of organic clicks go to the #3 position.

-79% of search engine users say they always/frequently click on the natural search results. In contrast, 80% of search engine users say they occasionally/rarely/never click on the sponsored search results.

Great. Now how does SEO work? 

Jonathan Strickland describes two philosophical strategies to SEO: black hat and white hat.

White hat strategies focus on finding keywords that people search that lead them to certain sites. It focuses on giving leads to the spiders or crawlers that are sent out to scan web pages for content.

Black hat strategies are looked down on by some in the SEO community. This strategy involves cramming keywords onto webpages to skew search results. This can be done using invisible text or text that is the same color as the web page background.