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Article
SEO at the Heart of Internet Marketing
© AffiliateSeeking - This article is not allowed to be re-published but can be linked to.
For many an e-commerce company and even traditional brick-and-mortar marketers, the Worldwide Web has opened up the opportunity for vast sales revenue. But putting up a web site was not enough. Soon enough, would-be "web-trepreneurs" wishing to be the next Amazon.com realized they had to practice Internet marketing as well.
Like traditional marketing, Internet marketing devotes a great deal of effort and resources to finding the target audience, understanding what motivates them, leveraging those drivers to perk up interest in coming to the web site (or blog post), building conviction and motivating them to the desired action.
The great volume of traffic attracted by search engines like Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek naturally made Search Engine Marketing the most attractive in the arsenal of Internet marketing tools. A new discipline was born: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
All SEO activities pursue the goal of attracting more of the right kind of visitors to a web site in the hope that once they "click through" and see what the site's index or landing page has to offer, they will view enough of the page to be interested, ask for more information, sign up for a membership or buy whatever goods and services are on offer.
In practice, the scope of SEO activities has come to include paid search. This means paying through the search engine advertising services (such as "Google AdWords" or "Yahoo Sponsored Search") to "own" the search terms Internet surfers use. A biofuel processor who bids high enough on the search phrase "cheap ethanol", for instance, earns the right to be displayed first or listed prominently in search results when interested Web users type in the phrase. The logic, of course, is that the higher or earlier one is listed in search engine results, the more likely that interested Web surfers will click through and reach one's site.
Given that bidding is blind - the SEO expert has only a vague notion of what competitors might be bidding - and since Google is by no means the only game in town, paid search outlays can take up the lion's share of the Internet marketing budget.
Strictly speaking, however, the central goal of SEO is to leverage organic or free search. That is, figuring out how search engine algorithms or formulas work and optimizing both the content of one's web sites and various internet marketing initiatives so as to maximize the chances of ranking high in regular search results.
Clued in by the fact that Google's search engine algorithms placed a high value on web sites that had many others linking to it, SEO focused almost from the very start on building as many links, affiliates and references as possible all over the Internet.
When the search engines caught on to such abuses such "link farms" and indiscriminate affiliate hoarding, however, SEO refocused on the power of key words and tags. Used appropriately and dynamically, this Internet marketing practice has the potential to drive thousands of visitors to a web site daily and with astounding cost-efficiency.
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