You may be hearing the term SEO a lot lately. With the economic downturn in full effect, businesses are shifting marketing dollars away from costly strategies like TV ads, and toward more cost-effective approaches like SEO.
So what is it?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In short, search engine optimization is a process (or series of processes) applied to a website that helps it to place highly on search results pages for specific keywords.
Here's a little exercise to help you understand what I mean:
Go to www.google.com and search for the word 'chocolate'. The top results include an article from Wikipedia, the Hershey's web site, the Godiva web site, Ghirardelli, and the website www.chocolate.com. All of these pages are clearly about chocolate, three of them are from world-renowned chocolate makers, and all five of them are extremely relevant to the term you searched for. These pages have been built in such a way as to convince the Google search engine that they are, in fact, the most relevant results for someone searching the keyword 'chocolate'.
These sites are optimized. And as a result of their high placement, they are going to get more traffic than any of the other 116,000,000 (seriously, look in the top-left of the results page) websites that Google found about chocolate.
Why SEO Is So Important
It's widely accepted that the power positions on a Google search results page are the top three spots. Once you drop to #4, the chances that someone will click through to your site are quite a bit smaller. The numbers drop even more drastically once you go past position #10 (that is, onto results page #2). Optimizing your web site is one of the only ways to get into those top few positions.
The other reason that SEO is such a strong marketing strategy is that it creates qualified connections. Someone using a search engine to find a product or service has already identified their own need and is actively searching for a solution. If you're one of the first options they come across, you've got a much better chance of getting the sale.
Learn more about our search engine optimization and other search marketing services.
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