If you were like me a couple of months ago, you have no idea what SEO is. I first heard the term mentioned by a speaker at an Ad Club event earlier this year. He mentioned it because with digital becoming such a big part of the industry he considered it crucial to know about SEO, SEA, SERP, HTML, JM3U9P. Okay, maybe not the last one but lets cut to the chase. I got a whirlwind tour of SEO this month from a guest speaker in one of my ad classes. This is what I learned:
What is SEO? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. In a nutshell, SEO is all about making a website rank higher in search engines so it receives more traffic.
Here’s a fun fact: While business have been slashing budgets left and right, search engine budgets increased by 44% this year!
There are 3 major search engines. Can you guess them? Google, Yahoo, and do we have a winner? Bing, Bing, Bing! Google is the mack daddy of search engines with about 72% of all search engine users opting to use Google. When users refer to a brand name as both a noun and a verb, it’s obviously become quite popular. Actually, there are a whole slew of Google terms like “Google chasing”: trying to copy Google’s algorithm and “Google bombing”: linking terms to a site. A while back, a bunch of bloggers got together and linked the term “miserable failure” to George Bush’s website. Google thought Bush’s site must be a popular for the term and thus, his site appeared on the results page for “miserable failure”.
A few definitions to be familiar with: SERP- search engine results page, PPC- pay per click paid search, Organic search- what is typed into a search bar and the results that come up.
Businesses utilize SEO for organic search. 70% of search engine users use organic search. On a SERP, there are PPC results on the top and side of the page in boxes labeled “sponsored links”. Businesses bid on keywords to become sponsored links. Each time a user clicks on one of these sites, the business is charged.
What happens when a user keys something into a search bar? A little something called crawling the web. Search engines function by running automated programs referred to as “spiders” or “bots” that use the hyperlink structure of the web to crawl the pages on the web. Search engines don’t see web pages like everyone else. That’s why using flash or having a site with one url is SERP suicide. Spiders essentially see a blank page.
3 Aspects of Search Engine Optimization: Technical, linguistic, and reputational.
Technical optimization involves fixing code/flash and identifying factors that may be harming rank.
Linguistic optimization identifies keywords to target for each web page (usually 1 or 2 keywords per page). There are two categories of keywords, long and broad. Long keywords are referred to as “long tail”, an example being ‘2006 Black Honda Civic’. Broad keywords are referred to as “head”, an example being ‘boots’. The most important part of a web page is the title. It’s what a search engine thinks the page is about.
Reputational optimization deals with getting links from high quality sites, i.e. having a web site linked from a CNN page.
Lastly, here are a few good sites to learn more about SEO: Search Engine Land, SEOMOZ, as well as Google’s webmaster guidelines.
