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SEO is the best known website promotional tool. SEO is only one part of the picture – but it is the first part. Almost everything else you can do to promote a website will be enhanced or crippled by good or bad SEO.
When you enter a search term in Google , Yahoo, Bing or any of hundreds of other search engine, you are presented with a list of results that may go on for several pages. Generally you'll look only at the results on the first or at most first and second pages before you click on one of the results, or try searching again.
SEO is a set of activities that interact with the search engines to increase your search rankings and encourage searchers to visit your website.
SEO tries to:
• Make it easy for search engines to find and evaluate your site (correct naming, url structure and keywording)
• Persuade the search engine that your site offers what the searcher wants (keyword-content matching)
• Demonstrate that your site is valued and respected by lots of people (links, referrals, social media activity, site size and traffic)
• Indicate the presence of new and unique content
• Satisfy any other variables that search engines assess (eg, load speed, link integrity, internal links)
See What does SEO actually do? for a detailed list of activities and see the blog post All about SEO for a convenient reference table listing most SEO activities.
The limitations to SEO are:
• It’s only search engine traffic, it excludes direct traffic, referrals from other sites and any other traffic that does not transit a search engine. Typically between 50% and 75% of a site’s traffic comes from search engines, so 25% to 50% is outside SEO.
• SEO doesn’t care what happens after the traffic gets to your site, whether it turns into a sale or not; it’s just about moving traffic from the search engine to your site.
• SEO results are inflated by people who are not looking to compare products or companies but rather trying to navigate to a specific site they have forgotten the url to. Still a valuable service, but not the same thing as winning an active comparison shopper.
To go beyond SEO and look at the role of your website in your total business model, see Website Engagement Optimisation (WEO).
Because this is web marketing, where almost nothing is absolutely clear cut, there are some qualifiers:
• People who have a satisfying experience on your site will tell others and many of them will use a search engine to find your site, so if your site does satisfy visitors it will get long term better SEO results, reflecting word of mouth traffic.
• SEO doesn’t work directly on site visit satisfaction, but Google especially does: it tries to go beyond what the SEO settings say about a site to guess what value users really place on it.
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