What is SEO?
A generic definition of SEO is “using techniques to make your site more visible to search engines. “ That is a good definition for search engines. Their job is to know what information is on your website, how relevant it is to the search query, and where to place your site in search results. This generic definition does not help business owners or marketing professionals understand how SEO relates to their business and what they can do to improve their search ranking.
Search engines search. That’s what they were designed to do, but they are really searching for ratings just like reality television networks. They need to find something acceptable in their results to keep customers coming back, even if the product is poor quality. It needs to be good enough until they find something better. Your online presence is the audition for your reality show. In a perfect computer world, search engines are invisible and undetectable while using their rules to evaluate what to display. Google spiders are like a reality show with perfectly secret and hidden cameras.
Search engines want to know everything about your website to determine how it might fit their search results. Just like a reality TV show, Google and other search engines are learning about you and placing cameras on your website to determine if the information, content, or interactions are good enough to feature in their results. The problem is that these cameras aren’t actually hidden. We all know they are there and just like attention starved actors we tend to put on a show. Companies and people don’t behave normally when someone is watching and evaluating every move. The result online has been the same as what we see on TV, overly scripted and a bad product. This has left users unhappy, and Google inventing more updates to penalize bad websites.
As SEO experts, we will be writing a series of blog posts to provide you with the information you need to help your business become more successful. The SEO techniques and tactics that we will discuss can get wildly complex. A common analogy is that internet SEO is like being in the Wild West. There are many techniques, but we have over simplified it by using two basic terms, “White Hat” and “Black Hat” techniques. In Google’s eyes, white hat is good and black hat is evil. While most people are happy to go to the movies and cheer for good conquering evil, in the world of SEO things aren’t that black and white. Rather, it is often a myriad of grey that Google algorithm updates try to shine light on.
