When Dinkum Interactive started almost six years ago, I began speaking to groups and companies about our brand new and fairly unheard of product offering. At the time, I talked a lot about search engine optimization – SEO – which was a brand new concept. Now, I no longer need to explain what SEO stands for but I still find myself outlining what SEO actually offers. These days, many people misunderstand what SEO is all about or believe it’s no longer useful.
I can tell you now, SEO is not dead. When explaining it today, I say search engines desperately want to give you the best results each time you search. The reason? If you find what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to use that search engine again and possibly click on a paid advertisement that generates money for the search engine.
SEO helps search engines determine the value of your website by laying out clearly and neatly what your company provides. If you employ SEO, each page of your website is like a separate brochure. You send searchers deep into your site to the page that contains the information they are looking for. For example, if I search for hotels in Bermuda, I don’t want to be sent to the homepage for the Bermuda Tourism Bureau. I want to go to a page about hotels. SEO helps search engines do this.
The biggest change in SEO is the criteria search engines use to determine the rank of a site. Now, there’s greater emphasis on social media and other new tools.
Three elements always in flux with SEO include:-
- Search engines will always look at how to become better in determining relevancy – for you. This means the algorithm used to allocate rank will change.
- Your competitors will probably look at what you’re doing and may decide to become more aggressive in their approach to the Internet which will affect your ranking.
- Users change how they source information. Six years ago, folks mainly used short phrases in their searches. Now, people are more likely to use sentences.
My take home message is this. The Internet continues to evolve and so should your approach to it. Those who embrace change and keep up with its evolution will see results with their bottom line. SEO is still an important part of Internet marketing, but it’s only one tool in an ever growing box.