The need for SEO
No matter if your website is an informational one or if it’s an online store to sell your products, you want people to come and visit it. Without visitors your information remains unknown and your products remain unsold. So, you need some sort of advertising in order to attract customers and visitors. A great deal of the web traffic you get is driven by the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN, because entering search queries in the search engines is a primary method of navigation for most of the Internet users. So it’s obvious that it is desired to have your website coming up in the search engine results pages (SERP).
With millions of websites out there, users usually check the first couple of results pages, so it’s important that your website is listed in those pages. You can do that by “buying” yourself a place in the sponsored links area or, showing up for free, through “organic” results. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization is a collection of techniques and practices that will make your website show up in the first page(s) of organic SERP.
The objective of SEO
As in any other endeavor you need to have defined goals and objectives; because if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know you got there? The goal for SEO is to rank in the first page(s) of the SERP for specific keywords with the final objective to bring in web traffic. So, the first step in obtaining good rankings is keywords researc. Effective keyword research is at the core of your SEO efforts can mean the difference between your success and failure.
The SEO - Internet Marketing relationship
SEO is a part of your overall web marketing efforts. It is an efficient tool to get you quality traffic, but to convert that traffic into sales it depends on how clear your marketing message is (”sale” here is used as a broad term for a product sale, a subscription, a quote, etc). To improve conversion rates, first you must analyze the traffic you’re getting, to see what type of visitors come to your website, traffic sources and which pages are the most and the least successful. This way you will know what needs (or needs not) to be changed on the pages and how your visitors are entering and leaving your website.
Think of SEO as the goal and the Internet marketing as the objective. Goals are general directions that are not specific enough to be measured (i.e. get better ranking, get more web traffic, etc.) while objectives are specific and measurable. They are concise, you can measure them (i.e. get $10,000 in product sales, get at least 200 subscribers to your newsletter, etc.)
In conclusion, SEO is the goal through which you can reach your web marketing objectives.
Additional reading:
Post a Comment