SEO, online marketing and what else?

So, now that I've decided that I'm going to be a writer of sorts, I figured that I ought to be writing. But what should I write about? A pretty obvious question with a fairly straightforward answer; I should begin with something that I know a lot about. With this in mind, I've decided that I'll start with my job - online marketing.

I've been involved with online marketing for just over 3 years and over the course of these 3 years, I've ended up specialising in SEO, or search engine optimisation for those who aren't familiar with the acronym. However, my exposure in the general online marketing field has been very broad and as a result, I also have a great deal of experience in affiliate, email, PPC, price comparison and Web 2.0 marketing too. But I'll begin with a bit about SEO.

What is SEO?

It's a fair question. Pre search engine optimisation experience, I was none the wiser about how websites were ranked by Google. Who'd bother thinking about that anyway? Well, I'm assuming that most people wouldn't really dwell too much on the topic, but as soon as I found out about SEO, I was totally blown away. People actually tweak websites to make them more attractive to the search engines and some even try to fool them. It's crazy, but it's true. There are a number of ways of optimising a website for certain search terms. The main bits that you'd want to look at would be the page title tags, the linking structure, the quality of the HTML code and more importantly, the website content or copy. There's a saying in the SEO industry that sums this last point up perfectly: Content is King. It's obvious, a search engine returns results based on something that someone's looking for, so a website that talks about that certain something must be best. That used to be the case and some devious people knew it and took advantage of it, but there are external factors too that affect a website's overall performance.

Inbound linking from external websites is essentially the crux of SEO. In its crudest form, search engine optimisation is a popularity contest. If you're out with your mates and a really attractive member of the opposite sex were to approach you and say, "I think your friend over there is really good looking", you might laugh. But at some point, you might even think to yourself that if this attractive person really rates your friend, then that must make your friend attractive too. Google will look at the sites linking into a website and then determine how good those links actually are and this forms part of the big algorithm that orders websites in the results pages. If an authoratative site, such as the BBC, were to link to yours, you can expect your website to perform quite well.

I've tried to avoid going into too much detail on this subject, as there's a lot of literature about SEO out there already. I don't want to go into the specifics about how you'd go about executing your SEO strategy, just wanted to share an insight into the subject. If you want to know more, don't hesitate to get in touch. Next time, I'll write about a different online marketing discipline. Bye for now.