This article is aimed at business owners and executives who may not be SEO or Web specialists or may have little knowledge of Web programming or online marketing but are interested in getting the best out of their website's potential to attract customers and check out cost effective ways to market an increasingly web-centric world of business.
What is search engine optimization?
A set of vague techniques that search engine specialists know and fiercely guard
It's about getting to rank 1 in Google for keywords that relate to your business, or industry
Process that magically brings traffic to your website
A set of techniques that ultimately enhances your website
Techniques that might allow a marketer to convert casual browsers of your website to customers
A marketing strategy
All of the above
None of the above
As if a question having eight options in the beginning of the article was not daunting enough, I might annoy you a little more by saying that search engine optimization (SEO) contains a little of all the those options. But stay with me a little more and together we will explore the world of SEO and discover what makes it so compelling that it should be an essential part of your marketing plan and how it can pack a ton of benefits for your business.
Why is SEO Important?
As more and more of your customers/ potential customers move online, mastering this marketing area becomes a critical tool. Google®/ SEO relevance.. In the major Muslim world economies whose own online demographic is increasing (see prev. article), even the major companies are behind in tapping into this critical marketing tool - especially as it gives them a level playing field with global marketers. Scanning through the websites of the DS100 - Top 100 Companies of the Muslim World, my conclusion is SEO is essentially ignored. Tthe companies are not visible on the top of search results for generic terms in their industry only when you search for their names. So, the practice is definitely not there.
In this article, I will discuss why having knowledge of SEO is essential to any business owner, manager or marketer concerned with expanding his business, not just for the IT person or webmaster who maintains the website. Then I will discuss what comprises SEO - an overview of its principles and techniques and its role in marketing. As you read this article, you will find that any materials that address the above options are highlighted.
SEO - How it Works
Essentially, SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords (Wikipedia ).
The difference between natural (organic or algorithmic) and paid results is illustrated in figure 1. The listings in the area marked A are natural results. (Note that listings in area marked B are paid listings and is a subject of another article in future). The natural results are those that the search engine, Google in this case, presented as top results as determined by its computer program.
To explain further, search engines have "bots" or search engine indexing programs that travel around the Web to "spider" or collect data about Web pages that they find - which could generally be about a trillion pages. All this data is stored in the search engine's database as an index. Once it has the data in its index, the search engine processes and analyses a range of data such as outgoing links to other pages, incoming links to the page from other Web sites, the quality of information as "judged" by its programs and the theme or keywords that it relates to.
All this indexing comes into play when a user enters a query in the search engine. Let's assume the user enters "search engine optimization." The search engine determines the most relevant results, ranks and presents them as in the example, it ranked wikipedia.com result as the best, followed by roi.com.au and so on.
So What Should you Do?
For your website to be listed in search engines' index and consequently in its results, you have to make no payment. However, you have to take steps to ensure that for relevant keywords, your Web pages have enough qualities that match the search engine's logic of relevance ranking so that your website's listings appear on the first page and on or near the top.
If that happens for major or general keywords or phrases, then you will possibly experience high increase in traffic. Major or general keywords generate high volume of searches. For example, "search engine optimization" is a general phrase that is searched thousands of times every day whereas a phrase such as "cheap search engine optimization service in Sydney" may be searched just a few times.
A search engine optimizer's job is to strive to ensure that their website is listed at or near the top of the first page of results for as many general keywords or phrases as possible and most of the low volume, specific keyword and phrases. In other words, their success lies in positioning the website as the leader in its category of business / industry in search engines.
SEO is a long process that involves working on the website itself with the objective of making it easy and preventing any problems in the way of the search engine's "bot" to index all the content on all the pages of the website. Coding, presentation and structure of the website is fixed in this set of processes. Therefore, SEO must be involved at the beginning of the Web site design so that it is designed for good searching performance from the very beginning, and would need to be "fixed" later.
This step is just a beginning, however. The website's business models and themes are analyzed and a set of keywords to be targeted is determined. The website's content is then analyzed and in many cases rewritten so that pages focus on particular themes and keywords have a high probability of being considered as "authority pages" by the search engine's programs.
Importance of Meta-Data
When I mention content, I do not mean just the visible content but meta-data too. Meta data is "data about data." It describes the information that each HTML page contains and is in the form of meta-tags - HTML tags that form part of a page. This set of factors that tie the optimizer to the website pages are also referred to as "on-page factors." Using frames to optimize database driven websites, which are sites that use Flash technology extensively, are just some of the issues that SEO deals with at this stage.
Google "Page Rank" Model and Global Standards
Let's now discuss off-page factors. Google, in its "PageRank" model, started to place a heavy emphasis on volume and quality of links pointing to a particular Web page. The logic is that if a page has a number of other good quality websites linking to it, then it must be authoritative. Therefore, link building is one of the major tasks of SEO. They search, select and get incoming links from relevant websites including directories, some of which may require a payment, blogs, social media Web sites, etc.
I believe SEO is a set of scientific techniques, which may look geeky but are essentially common sense wrapped in processes. Good SEO ensures that the website is well-designed, according to Web standards (standards of design and coding mandated by World Wide Web Consortium and publicly available via http://www.w3c.org), not just based on its looks and attractiveness.
It is logically laid out and structured, with a site map that can be understood instantly. It has focused content that builds on pre-determined themes and target keywords that are useful to the business. The website will become well regarded in the world of Internet, demonstrated by the fact that other reputed websites in its category will have mentioned and linked to it.
Ultimately a Critical Marketing Strategy Component
Subsequently, all these steps combined results in a substantial improvement to the website's capability to engage customers and providing them with the next level of their interaction with the business.
The origins of SEO begin about 10 years ago when website owners realized the substantial amount of traffic that search engines can create. They wanted to leverage this new source of customers and leads by improving their websites' ability to attract them. While search engines zealously guard their algorithms to prevent people from using the information to manipulate search results, many people learnt the methods by experience and trail-and-error, combined with the information that the search engines provided.
SEO is today considered an essential part of marketing strategy because of the amount of traffic that it directs to the Internet. It is also cost effective because once you have invested your efforts in SEO to fix technical issues, re-write content, build links and other tasks, then you begin getting traffic without having to pay for each click. Once the additional traffic you receive begins to cover the cost of efforts, then all additional traffic and subsequent gains (incremental benefits) from it become free. Of course, you need to ensure that your website performs well in terms of converting the incoming traffic to new customers, sales or in however way that benefits your business.
By Hasnain Zaheer
© Dinar Standard 2009
