The reason website owners perform SEO marketing services is to get their website onto page 1 of Google!
This article aims to make the distinction between search engine optimisation and search engine marketing to show that the latter explains much more accurately what needs to happen to a website to move your site up the Google rankings to a top position on page 1.
What is the definition of SEO?
Let’s first of all look at the dictionary definition of the word optimisation:
“the act of rendering optimal;”
and the definition of the word optimal is:
“Best or most favourable;”
This would explain why so many ‘inexperienced’ web developers think that Search Engine Optimisation is all about building your website in the most favourable way for Google to read and understand!
Examples of ‘static’ SEO
I have seen dozens of situations where a website owner is paying for SEO each month. Just to find that the web developer is merely making sure that the on page SEO is correct for all of the existing and new pages that are added.
Whilst it is true that the on page SEO needs to be correct for everything there is on the site, there is so much more that needs to be done!
What does Google want you to do?
Google wants you to build a website that:
- people love
- people return to frequently
- has a wonderful experience for all of its visitors
- has lots of good information for the people that visit it
- is current and up to date
- is popular because lots of other websites have linked to it
- is accurate and up-to-date
- is fast to load
- has social media interaction
You may well ask, why does Google want you to build a website with all of the above characteristics? It’s quite simple really. If you do a search in Google and the number one returned website is poor, that reflects badly on Google! If this happened frequently for lots of searches, people may stop using Google (their preferred search engine) thinking… “Well it’s not a very good search engine because it only returns poor websites!”
How does it decide?
So, with lots of things on the list that Google want you to do, which ones are the most important? Said differently, which activities can Google use as the biggest/most important signs of quality for it to decide that your website is worthy of position 1 in Google?
The answer is content and links!
First of all, let’s look at content…
When people go online. What is it they search for? I think we’d all agree in the first instance… people are searching for information. A website that has no text and only pictures would not be returned for anything because Google cannot interpret pictures.
On the other hand, a website like Wikipedia.org, that only contains masses of high-quality original content with very few images… is in Google’s top 20 search result positions for 18,726,383 keywords!
So I think this proves the point that Google loves original content….
Now let’s look at links…
So let’s imagine a scenario where two rival competitors both build websites that have one hundred pages of original content. Both websites have good on page SEO and both have all of the necessary features that make them a good visitor experience.
How would Google decide which website to place first?
The answer is quite simply the website with the most back links. Just for a point of reference here… It isn’t just the ‘most’ back links, it is the website that has highest quality set of back links!
If you wish, have a read of the original abstract report “the anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine” by Sergey Brin and Larry Page – http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Panda and Penguin
You may have heard of ‘Google Panda’ which is all about content and ‘Google Penguin’ which is all about back links.
Google Panda is all about Google enhancing its filters and algorithms so that it finds the best quality content and discounts poor quality duplicate content.
Google Penguin is all about finding unnatural spammy looking back links from low quality websites that are being used to manipulate search results.
The fact that Panda and Penguin exist just serves to prove that content and links are the two most important aspects for you to consider in getting your website to number one!
Why are SEO Marketing Services better?
Let’s start this the same way… What’s the definition of the word marketing?
” The action or business of promoting and selling products or services.”
The operative word here is promoting!
We have just learned that it’s all about content and links…
Consider this…
SEO marketing services is promoting high quality content by creating high quality back links every month!
In practice and at a simple level, this means creating high quality content and finding ways to get lots of other websites to link to it on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and you will be number one in Google.
It should be SEM not SEO
For some reason the term SEO has become the recognised expression. So when someone says I will do your search engine optimisation they are in effect saying they will do the work necessary to get your website to number one in Google.
The term SEM or Search Engine Marketing, I believe to be much more accurate in explaining the activities that are required each month.
So to conclude…
I believe thousands of website owners would be in a much better place if they thought SEM, rather than SEO.
If an inexperienced website owner first heard the term Search Engine Marketing… They would much more readily understand that the main building blocks was content and links in order to perform well in Google!
