| SEO is what it’s all about for the next ten years | |
|
I know search engine optimization (SEO) is about as transparent a practice and profession as a brick made of mud but whether you like it or not the next decade of the 21st century will be defined by your ability to understand what it is and use it correctly. In this regard SEO is not unlike getting a web presence in the first place. In the early days of the web having a website and getting it to do what you want required either arcane programming language knowledge or deep pockets. Those who could, did, those who couldn’t paid to get it done and anyone falling in between was resigned to talking it up at the local pub or, else, getting some amateurish put-together page with stars flashing in the background at Geocities. Then came along the interactive revolution on websites, new programming languages and the explosion of the Open Source community and what we now have are the options to put a professional site together which would have cost tens of thousands of dollars for just a few hundred. Sometimes, depending on what we need to achieve, we can get a professional web presence totally free (like a Wordpress blog or a Blogger.com account) and when it comes to forking out our hard-earned lucre the fact that we can shop around and know exactly what we want and how to ask for it ensures that we get the maximum return for our investment (ROI always excites the online business types). So you can decide just who to go to in order to integrate the PayPal API correctly on your website and enable its eCommerce function just like you know just what to ask for in order to get it done and know how to test it and how to check if it works. SEO is going through the same development curve right now. It has become necessary because the web is so big that unless you want your site to be found by you, your dog and the guy you bored to death at your aunt’s 60th birthday party, you need to have a coherent, structured, online campaign which takes into account search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and the latest social media tagging and social networking practices. Because no one really understands (yet) exactly what it is there is that assumption that SEO is something magical (and therefore the province of some knowledgeable elite) or something expensive (and reserved only for those with Swiss bank accounts) but nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact it is still easier to search engine optimize your website than put a Wordpress blog http://wordpress.com/together and that, in itself, says a lot. So why is it so obtuse? Why do so few people really understand what it is and why can it be so expensive? These are just the kind of questions which conspiracy theorists use to fuel debates about hidden agendas and secret cabals with esoteric languages and obscure rites known only amongst themselves. Ask the average search engine optimizer (though some prefer the term search engine engineer) to tell you what they do and they will cite the latest Google algorithmic change, along with meta tag reversal the importance of H1 headings and social tagging your linkbait content to an outreach social network platform. Depending on how glibly they have carried this off it will be followed by the four figure sum required to optimize your website. At that point you realize that this is no time to balk. You really want your website to be found. So you have to cough out big and get it to Google’s first page and the person whose tech-speech (and cost) just bedazzled you is the right one to invest in. Many a webmaster have gone down that path so there is no need to feel like you’re the only one who has been taken in. The truth about the SEO industry is a little less exotic and a little less impressive. Yes, like almost anything which has to do with the web, you do need to have a certain amount of knowledge, but you also can apply common sense, pick things up as you go along and, like everything which has to do with the web, it is rapidly becoming end-user accessible in terms of being something which you can do yourself and, having understood it better, you can outsource specific aspects of it at a relatively low cost and with measurable results. You can, for instance, hire someone to create a number of links for you with specific anchor text and a specified PageRank on the link page. You could hire someone to write web content for you which has been specifically optimized for a pre-specified keyword. Just like you can hire someone to do some social marketing for you using their own Facebook and Twitter profiles. What increases the success of all this and decreases the cost is knowledge. Knowledge really is the key. The moment you don’t have it you are back to the pre-web days when taking your car for a regular service at your local garage and were consigned to getting second mortgage to pay for it as your local mechanic would hitch his overalls and make the noise of sucking air through his teeth as he looked under your hood. Every time you do not know what you are getting you remove any way of checking the quality, depth and efficacy of the service you are buying. The degree of ignorance surrounding SEO is made even more remarkable by the fact that it is not rocket science, nor is it programming or car repair any of which are, by comparison, infinitely harder. If you can read this you can understand SEO and if you can write a little you can do it. Basically, success at search engine optimization depends, mostly, in your ability to demonstrate online that your site is social active, widely popular and visible at many points of the web and has the ability to deliver real value when it comes to its content and what online visitors want. To do all this you put together, in a way which is specific only to your website, some content creation, some content promotion and a little content marketing. That’s it. You’ve just optimized your website. I am oversimplifying things a little out of necessity. This is not the kind of article which will teach you how to do SEO. If you really want to find out check out my free SEO Tips or buy my book or spend a year or two boning up on everything you can find online, assimilate it, test it and refine it to make it your own. The real point of this article is that SEO has become necessary by everyone with a website and everyone can do it themselves (or decide to outsource some parts because they do not have the time necessary to do them themselves). David Amerland is the author of the Search Engine Optimization book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page published by New Line Publishing and available to buy from Amazon.com and any quality bookshop. The ebook version of the book is available for Amazon Kindle as well as Mobipocket, smartphone and Sony eBook Reader formats and available to purchase from any quality ebook retailer. You can also purchase it directly from this website. He masterminds winning SEO strategies for complex online business and helps the average webmaster get their site to the position it deserves. David has been instrumental in taking websites to the top of Google's first page in a way that has kept them there year after year. If you would like David to work on one of your SEO projects drop us a line with your request.
|
