Posts Tagged ‘seo’

So yesterday I covered the topic of what SEO is.  However, it has a counterpart that you may or may not be familiar with: SEM – Search Engine Marketing.  Now, to someone who doesn’t work with this stuff every day, you’re probably thinking there’s really no difference between the two.  Not so quick.  Search Engine Optimization is the method by which you help search engines index your site.  Search Engine Marketing is the paid inclusion of your site in their results pages.  You see those links that are set off from your normal results either in a colored or outlined box, or in another smaller column off to the side of the search engine?  See that little heading that says “Sponsored Links” or something of the sort?  Those are paid advertisements that are shown when people search for whatever it was you just searched for.  The people who market their websites by bidding on these keywords are called Search Engine Marketers.  They help businesses attract traffic to their websites by buying the traffic through keyword auctions.

Let’s take an example keyword phrase – “highest paying keywords”.  Now, go to Google and type in that phrase.  (You might even see this blog as one of the top entries.  We go back and forth between being in the top couple of listings and being pushed back to the second or third page.)  You probably see a couple of links on the right hand side under Sponsored Links right?  Now, change your search to “top paying keywords”.  Notice any difference in the number of links shown?  If so, that means that there’s more advertisers bidding on that space.  They want their ad shown instead of their competitors.  I’ll go more in depth as to how this bidding works another day.  For  now, you’ve at least gotten a taste of what the phrase SEM means.

When people ask what it is I do, my typical answer is that I work on the Internet.  (Or Internets for those of you who speak GW.)  That’s because most people don’t understand the difference between a web developer and a web designer.  Nor do they understand what SEO, SEM, PPC or any number of other TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) mean.  So this blog is my attempt at explaining a little bit about what it is I do on this vast world wide web while I’m working on a book that goes into a bit more detail.  Hopefully I’ll have the book nearing completion around Christmas, but we’ll just have to see how everything pans out.

So when I say that one of the things I do is SEO I’m not talking about Synthetic Engine Oil (though I do run Rotella T in my biodiesel fueled trucks) and I’m not a Special Equipment Operator.  When I talk about SEO I’m typically talking about Search Engine Optimization.  Usually when I tell someone that I do Search Engine Optimization they give me this blank look like what I’m talking about is as understandable to them as explaining the pythagorean theorem to them in Greek or Latin.  But it’s really not that difficult of a concept to grasp.

You see, in order to be able to provide results to people performing a search on Google, Google has to know what’s out there on the Internet.  It has these programs that it’s constantly running called crawlers or spiders that go out to every corner of the web and make a note of what those pages contain.  But how does that program decide what to store in it’s log about the web pages that it’s looking at?  Well, there’s a variety of things that program is looking at.  Some web pages are built to easily tell that spider what the page is about, while others are rather vague.

Let’s say for instance Google has a bunch of results for blogs about crocheting baby blankets.  One blog it finds has a title of “My Blog”.  They name the titles of the posts such things as “Post One”, “Post Two”, “Post Three”, etc.  There’s meta tags in the web page’s code that normally contain keywords or a description of what the page is about but the keywords are blank and the description is simply “My First Blog”.  Google also has a blog in it’s database with a title of “Crochet Blog: How To Crochet For Fun”.  That author names their posts “How to Crochet a Baby Blanket”, “How to Crochet a Knit Cap” and “How to Crochet a Pair of Socks”.  The keywords are descriptive with things such as “blog crochet instructions baby blanket knit cap socks” and the description meta tag on each blog post is the first couple of sentences of the blog post.

Now, in the scenario above, when a user such as your sister or mom or aunt goes to search for “crochet baby blankets”, which blog do you think Google is going to list first?  The one titled “My First Blog” or the Crochet Blog?  The Crochet Blog, according to Google, is a lot more relevant to the user’s search results, so it has a much better chance of being on the first page of results than does the “My First Blog”.

So what I do is help people wanting to publish information or create websites better tell the search engines what their websites are about.  After all, you can spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign, but still never reap the benefits of the free and very targeted advertising – simply telling the search engines what your website is about.  I teach people about the meta tags in their website’s code and how to choose the right keywords and descriptions.  I teach people how to design their online marketing plan.  I teach people about social networking and the benefit to their products.  For quite some time I’ve done consulting and running my own websites.  I figured now it’s time that I branch out a little further and start to share all this knowledge.  So what you see here is my Information Overload blog.  Stay tuned to continue learning about the world of Internet Marketing.  It’s quite a vast topic, but I’ll continue writing about it for quite some time if I can just keep on top of it.  Enjoy!