Navigating the World of SEO

Scott Cowley, Stukent Expert

In a Stukent Expert Session Webinar, Scott Cowley goes into detail about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to best utilize optimization techniques to build a profit. In a world where technology is a one stop shop for information, entertainment and shopping, having a website that is easy to find is extremely beneficial.

One of the first steps in building an optimized website is to learn and understand how people search and what they search for. There are 3 main types of searches; Informational, Navigational and Transactional. Within those 3 types of searches users are quite predictable in how they search. Most users want the search engine to do all the work for them, so when searching they may add descriptive keywords like, “Best” headphones or “Cheapest” headphones to bring up a more relevant webpage. Understanding this, will allow the web-builder to design web pages with keywords that will meet the search criteria of their target group.

According to Mr. Cowley, there are two parts to SEO, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. On-page SEO is when a search engine such as Google, utilizes keywords on a webpage to determine the relevance of that webpage. Google’s algorithm will crawl the website and find keywords that are related to the search criteria and rank them higher due to relevancy. How to utilize keywords is a very complicated task. It is important to not oversaturate or cannibalize your site with keywords. Using too many keywords and using the same keywords will overcrowd and delegitimize your site. If everything is important, than nothing is important. Using tools like Google Adwords a data archive, can give insights on what people search for so a web builder can tailor the webpage to the search patterns of the consumer.

Courtesy: Marketing Comando

However, Google does not use relevancy alone to rank pages. Their algorithm also uses Off-page SEO, which ranks pages based on popularity. The popularity of a website can be determined by the number and quality of links that direct you to a particular web page. It is important to know that Google ranks web pages and not full web sites, so certain pages can have higher rankings than others.  Many businesses will use Social Media as a platform to put out content and generate traffic to a website in order to boost popularity. There are many techniques that can be used to generate traffic and if that technique is used in conjunction with keyword optimization it will yield the best search result placement.

Overall, SEO can be a powerful tool to market and communicate. What is important to know is that digital marketing is more than just having a web presence, but knowing how to use all of the tools and resources available to intentionally drive a message or conversion.