Introduction to search engine optimization. (what SEO is?)
The objectives for this lesson are to:
- Explain the importance of SEO
- Describe SEO
- Identify SEO components
- Highlights the benefits of SEO
What SEO is?
What is Search engine optimization? Well, it’s all about optimizing your website.
So that it ranks well in the search engine’s results page.
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through the organic search engine results.
Importance of SEO
Number one is to be on the top in search engines which makes you more credible.
The majority of search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top five suggestions in the results pages.
To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website or customers to your online store, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.
Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the website’s trust.
Search engine optimization will also get more users to your website and provide a better user experience.
It’s not only about search engines but good SEO practices that improve the user experience and usability of a website.
Next it can help you earn the competitive edge.
Example: Take two websites are selling the same things, the SEO optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.
Lastly, It has one of the best ROI or returns on investment in advertising.
The reason for this is because SEO is an inbound marketing strategy, that is, it allows you to market to people when they are looking for the product and services, your business provides.
Search ecosystem components
The right way to start exploring more about SEO foundation is by understanding the three main components of search engine optimization.
Those are; the users. search engines and search engine optimizers.
Let us start with most important one.
Users
These are made up of the hundreds of millions of of people, just like you, who use search engines like google every day.
These are people from all over the world searching with text, with images, with videos, all kinds of things.
All of these are considered the users and they are what drives SEO from the perspective of a search engine and from the SEOs, the people who practice the profession.
Search engines
Search engines are the technology owned by technology companies.
The most common one of this, of course is Google.
Google is a company based out of Mountain view, California.
It’s dominating the arena of search right now and has been for a while but it’s not the only player in the game. in fact, there are a lot of other important players.
The other search engines that are big in the United States are Yahoo, which you may have heard of because it’s been around for a long and Bing, which is owned by Microsoft.
Outside the United States there are some other search engines that are very important.
First and foremost we have Baidu, which has an enormous market share in China.
You also have Yandex, which has the most market share in Russia and then Naver, which is very important and has the most market share in south Korea.
In addition to that, you have very specific search engines that do one thing very well.
A great example of this would be Wolfram alpha, which works on computational knowledge and complex mathematics.
Search engine optimizer
It’s an acronym and it can be a very confusing acronym because it means two different things.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the field and search engine optimizer, which is the profession.
So if you remember that. you will get everything else, that’s the trickiest part of this opening section.
So what does an SEO do?
Well, an SEO does a lot of things and actually as we will talk about, it’s an increasing amount of roles but the important thing to get is that an SEO focus on influencing organic ranking in the search engines.
So, that don’t primarily work on the paid advertising side of search.
Search ecosystem components: Incentives
Now that we know the main components with some major players in SEO, let’s look at what incentivizes them and by understanding their incentives, you’re going to understand what drives the market.
The first one we have is users, and everybody including yourself is this. This is the world’s who’s using the internet to try and find information.
The incentive for the users the internet they possibly can on any topic that they can, anytime, and in any language.
So it’s a very big goal but something that search engines work towards trying to solve.
So what incentivizes the search engines?
You see, they’re trying to provide the most relevant results to users worldwide but they are doing in it two ways.
They are doing it through organic results which they do not get paid for.
There are things that they are going to just provide so that they can offer the breath of information that they have.
The second way they do this is though advertising. They offer ads from advertisers along with regular search results.
The ads in the search results are what powers more than half of Google’s revenue.
So, what is incentivizing the search engines? It’s to full.
They are trying to attract a large of users through the organic users but also provides ads with relevant information and they get paid when people click on the ads.
This really works well for SEOs. They are focusing on the organic side.
It’s completely different profession than working on paid advertising side.
But what’s important for SEOs is to work on getting their information or more often their clients information to the top of the search engine, so that their relevant information is shown to the world’s audience of searchers.
What drives search Ecosystem?
Now that we have the main components identified and their incentives, let’s look at the relationship between them.
So, we have the users who are just looking for relevant information. They want the best information that’s the most convenient.
Convenient usually means free. For search engines, you have two things they are trying to do.
it’s getting a worldwide audience of searchers by providing that information and they went to provide ads so that they can get paid and be profitable.
You will then have the SEOs who want to provide the relevant information as long as it’s theirs or their clients’ information over others in the results and gain more traffic to their websites.
So, you have a lot of these forces that are working together.
You have these search engines who need the SEOs to help organize information.
Many times business owners and companies don’t have the knowledge or the ability to make their sites workable for users or search engine-friendly.
So, the SEO tends to drive that system and you have the search engines that then provide this service of providing information.
But on a day-to-day level, you will see that this relationship shifts a lot. Between the search engine and the SEOs, there tends to be some tension.
SEO can help businesses make better websites and rank higher but there are also SEOs who utilize underhanded techniques that are discouraged by the search engines.
This tension goes back and forth on certain subjects but while search engines attempt to inform business owners and businesses how to make more relevant and compliant websites.
More website owners don’t want to be bothered with learning something new. Owners simply want to run their business.
Thus, it falls to SEOs to provide this valuable service. But this tension does tend to remain in between SEO and search engines, as long as there are those who will push the boundaries of the search engine guidlines.
Ultimately, for the search engines, profit is the goal.
The better the quality of website in their database, the better the relevance of content they will provide the searchers.
SEO and social media
Knowledge of SEO raises the level of an entire organization’s marketing through all channels.
First, by researching and developing a clear list of targeted search term as keyword.
You can use that keyword list in the rest of your marketing.
In this case, by utilizing keywords from your research, your posts, articles, and interactions on social media, we will be using the right keywords to engage your audience.
In addition, they also help to raise the overall context of your social media interactions as connected to your website and overall marketing by having consistency in your keywords.
Second, social media does not have a direct effect on your SEO but an indirect effect.
Good articles or videos published to social media can generate links and links are a vital part of SEO rankings.
There is a connection but not a direct one.
Of course, optimizing your social content with keywords, links, and SEO techniques can help you gain more visibility and reach the right audiences.
SEO : Pros and Cons
Whenever you are doing a deep dive of an idea, I find it’s really useful to first take a step back, figure out where it fits into everything else.
So, when we are looking at this, remember that SEO is just one channel of many.
There’s many different aspects that go into online marketing and SEO just has it’s own unique pros and cons of that.
Benefits of SEO over other channel
| Search engine Optimization | Other channels |
| Less expensive -Pay only for SEO | More expensive -Pay third-party for PPC and email marketing |
| Lasting results -Efforts continue to bring results long after | Short-lived results -Efforts stop showing results when you don’t pay |
Now what are the cons of SEO?
Well, that depends as there are some risks.
If you have the proper training, understanding of SEO, and follow best practices, the benefits will usually follow close behind.
However, if you attempt to work on client sites and make mistakes, could cost you a job or potential legal issues.
I have seen those who think they know SEO but their knowledge is only based on older techniques that are outdated and those techniques were marginally acceptable at that time and clients site have suffered as a result of those mistakes.
This is why certification is so vitally important in this industry.
Finally, some SEO can also be very aggressive with their techniques.
If they get caught, they could get penalized and cause a website to be removed from the search engine.
The last issue is that it can be very competitive for certain industries and certain keywords.
Depending upon your market, it could be very competitive which will demand more exacting execution of your optimization.
Unfortunately, these highly competitive areas are also full of SEOs who are willing to take aggressive risks in order to outrank their competition.
Avoid Outdated Techniques
The biggest mistakes that SEOs make are using outdated techniques.
Unfortunately the worst place for SEO advice can be found on a search engine.
You see, for more than 20years, people have been trying to figure out how to gain ranking on a search engine.
As they have found some exploit or or marginal technique, they have told pthers, people have written articles.
They have been published online and those articles are still out here.
Imagine if you read an article about SEO from, 1998, you might be told to have a white background on your website and then put blocks of text on the page colored white as well.
Then put keywords in those blocks of text that the user won’t see but search engine will.
This would be to increase your keyword density.
Back then, SEOs were trying to have keywords density of about five to eight percent on a page to gain an edge in the ranking.
Now, what would happen if you were to implement that technique today?
I will tell you right away.
The search engines would spot it in an instant and likely penalize your site and possibly even remove it.
SEO career in Organization
Let us talk about careers in search engine optimization.
Depending upon where you go with your career, either as an individual or part of a large team, your experiences will be completely different.
Performing SEO as part of a large international company will provide completely different challenges and experiences than working with small businesses or even an agency.
Each has their own dynamic work environment, hierarchy, and responsibility.
Because of this, you may have more freedom to try things in some organizations and a much more limited and focused responsibility in others.
Now while all organizations are different, there are some common elements that you can expect in each of these types of businesses.
I will cover what you can generally expect if you are working at different types of businesses.
Enterprise, small, or medium size business, agency, SEO company, or as an individual.
Enterprise SEO
- Part of a large team
- The website contains thousands of millions of pages
- international website, multiple languages
- Specialized work
- Fixed direction or strategy
- Researched and defined SEO tactics Unavailability of programmers or IT support
- Precedence given to other department
- People skills
When working with an enterprise-level company, there will be significant differences from other work experience for starters.
This is where you will most likely work on a large team as there are thousands to millions of pages within the website.
Usually, there will be international websites, multiple languages, and sub domain structures to account for many levels, products or businesses within the enterprise.
Typically, when working as part of a large team, SEO duties tend to be rather specialized than broad.
The direction or strategy of the SEO is up to the director level or higher.
So, there is no variation outside of the set scope of work.
The tactics used are researched and defined with very little room going for outside of the conventional work.
Now, some of the frustration enterprise level SEOs have expressed are frustrations with other departments.
There may be conflicts with IT or with programmers who do not see your requests as a priority.
other departments may take president and overrule some of the tactics that may be necessary for optimal visibility.
Large organization can be siloed.
This means that each department typically works independently of each other and sometimes there is very little crossover influence into other department.
Learning to work well with other individuals and explaining your reasoning for actions are key skills for this environment.
The upside is the vast scope of work within your responsibility.
Dealing with that amount of pages, international websites, languages will provide you experience that most SEOs may never encounter.
Your problem solving abilities will be tested to find workaround and you will have to address issues that arise from past programmers and SEOs.
Developing your people skills is essential but that will help you.
Small-Medium Business SEO
- Multiple Positions
- More skills, more value
- Knowledge across domains
- High input on direction and strategy
- Report to marketing director or VP
- Work with vareity of personalities
Working as an SEO with a small to medium -size business has unique challenges as well.
The biggest is that SEO may not be the only thing you do.
In this context the more skills you have and digital marketing disciplines you understand, the more valuable you will be.
Having experience across programming, design and other marketing skills is essential alongside your SEO knowledge.
As an SEO, it might be part of your responsibility and you will have much more input on directions and stratrgy.
Most likely, you will answer to a marketing director or a VP or the owner.
Again, you will be working alongside a variety of people and personalities.
People’s skills, again in this context, are highly valued as you will have to be part of a small team and communicate.
SEOs in Agencies
- Marketing agency, SEO agency, or Digital marketing agency
- Smaller team
- Interdisciplinary knowledge
- Work on numerous websites
- Varity of clients and business types
- Unique challenges
agency SEO can be in different forms:
A full service marketing agency or strict SEO agency or a digital-only marketing agency.
Each have their own unique style of handling customers, the services they offer, and responsibilities.
Most likely, you will be part of a small team and have additional responsibilities.
Your SEO knowledge will be enhanced with an understanding of additional disciplines like analytics, page search, design and programming, and other marketing function.
The biggest advantage to working in the agency space is that you will be exposed to numerous types of website.
Many different types of businesses and business models.
Everyday you will have different challenges as you may be working on an e-commerce site, then next a publisher.
After that, you may spend a few days on keyword research for a new client.
This is probably the most dynamic atmosphere for an SEO as always new challenges with new website.
Fixing old websites, and learning different business types.
Individual SEO
- You are the CEO
- Responsive for gaining new clients
- Mix of sales, personal, and technical skills
- Hard work
- No client, No paycheck
- Dynamic work on different websites.
- Dealing with clients with budget problems.
If you are opening your own SEO company, then this experience will be like no other.
You are the CEO, you are the responsible for everything from gaining new business to then working on that business.
Sales and personal skills are key as you have to convince people to trust you with their websites.
Then, you have to perform.
The mix of personal and technical skills is critical as your business will not succeed without your hard work.
You will have to work harder than if you were at a company.
To some, it is too much responsibility because if there is no client, there is no paycheck.
For others, they embrace this and love the challenge and the overwhelming amount of hours required to start and run a successful business.
You will learn to deal with different websites, fix old ones, recommend new ones.
You will also have to deal with the website owners who may not have the budget for changes or want to deal with the websites.
This can be the most challenging of all career choices.
Opportunities and skill
Of couse this is only a brief overview of what you may find at different companies.
The amazing thing is that SEO skill can lead to so many other opportunities. Software companies need marketing, so they need SEO.
In fact, you may find many startups need SEO as well.
Even more amazing is that some SEOs are hired by search engines.
Who are better to hire than those who already understand how a search engine works?
However, some SEOs develop skills in other areas and find that they can bridge into those areas and develop specialized marketable skills.
Many SEOs have branched out and become content developers or by finding their niche in programming they have moved into design and development.
SEP is a core skill to marketing online.
You will find that it can be used in many many areas and your experience may be completely unique to you.
Key takeaways
SEO helps you get more users to your website, get good ROI, and provide better user expirience.
SEO is about optimizing your website for search engines.
It involve organic optimization practices that increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.
There are three main components of search engine Ecosystem: Users, search engines, and search engine optimizer.
Search engine optimization is comparatively less expensive than other ads channel.
Moreover, it has lasting effects as the SEO techniques you sue today will continue provide results in the long run
Read course introduction to know more about it.