SEO in Digital Marketing – Just imagine having an outlet without having any signage onto it – no name, no windows…nothing in particular. You would expect people may drop in out of curiosity, looking for product A, whereas you are selling product B. Now, when you have a shop with a proper name and probably the product image on it, this would attract so many people off the street, and they would ask for what you sell, and some of these customers would tell other potential targets about their buying experience and about your products and your shops.

The first example is like a website that is not optimized, while the second one relates to an optimized website.

SEO (Search engine optimization) is the process of making a web page easy to find, easy to crawl, and easy to categorize. It is about helping your customers find out your business from among thousand other companies. SEO is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. It is basically concerned with a holistic move towards driving customers to your business via online platforms. And to do that, one must ensure the website ranks higher in the SERP (search engine result page). To give you an idea on this, let’s start with this fact – nearly 14 billion searches online take place every month. The advent of Global economy nearly makes every business have an online presence. Just imagine a fraction of those 14 billion searches happen for your business. To achieve that benchmark, your website must rank higher in the SERP, must perform well in the social media marketing, and the PPC (pay per click) activities must be very well along with other digital marketing tasks.

For any business, advertising is of utmost need. When any business goes online, the advertising works best to garner a huge amount of web traffic. SEO gives an opportunity for a great deal of free advertising.

A proper SEO makes a website rank in the first page of SERP. And the common belief is people generally scan and review the first two pages of the SERP. Nearly, 74% of consumers use search engines to find local business information. Compared to online marketing, such as PPC, social media marketing, email marketing program, SEO provides fairly good ROI. On a daily basis, nearly 80-90% customers check online reviews before finally purchasing any products.

How does SEO work?

Search engine are not humans but the software that crawls the web page content. So, not like humans search engines are text-driven. They complete a number of activities that bring search results – crawling, scanning and storing (or index), courses of action, measuring pertinence, and recovering. The distinction with an excellence count is that you’re calculating components of design, rather than actions of an individual. For example, some of the elements that are known to build up a quality score are as follows:

• Website names and URLs
• Page content
• Meta tags
• Characteristics of Link
• Usability and accessibility
• Page design

Let’s see how this whole cycle works:

• Crawling: Every search engine has software, known asCrawler or Spider (in case of Google it is Googlebot), that crawls the webpage content. It is not possible for a crawler to see daily if any new page appeared or any existing page is updated, some crawlers may not visit a webpage for a month or two. In this connection, it should be important to remember what all a search engine can crawl: it cannot crawl image, Flash Movies, JavaScript, Frames, Password protected page, and directories. Therefore, if you have majority of these in your website, it would be better to run a keyword simulator test to see if these are viewable by the spider. Those that are not viewable are not spidered and not indexed or not processed. On the other hand, they will be missing for search engines.
• Indexing: Post-crawling content the Spider stores the indexed page in a giant database from where those can be retrieved upon entering a related search string or keyword. For humans this will not be possible, but for search engine, this is every day’s work. Sometimes, the search engines cannot understand the page content. And for that, you need to correctly optimize the page.
• Search work: With every search request, the search engine processes, i.e., it contrasts the key phrases searched with the pages indexed and stored in its record. More than millions of pages have the same search phrases. So, the search engine is an act ofmeasuring the relevancy of all the pages and matches with what it indexed as per the keywords inserted in the SERP.
• Algorithms: A search algorithm is a diagnostic means that takes a puzzle (when there is a search with a particular keyword), sorts through a record that contains cataloged keywords and the URLs that have relevancy with those keywords, estimates some probable answers, and then reverts pages that have the word or phrase that was looked for, either in the body content or in a URL that directs to the page. Three search algorithms are there – On-site, Off-site, and Whole-site algorithms.

Each type of algorithm definitely looks at different aspects of the webpage, such as Meta tags, title tags, links, keyword density, etc., yet they all are part of a much larger algorithm. That is the reason why same search string generates different results in different search engines having distinct algorithms. And all these search engines (primary, secondary, and targeted) periodically do keep on changing their algorithms, so you must know how to adapt to these changes if you want to stay on the top. This requires sound SEO expertise.

• Retrieving:The end–result will be visible in the search results.

 

SEO and Digital Marketing

Apparently, it seemed there is no such difference between SEO and digital marketing approaches; both execute the same functions and possess the same skills. Only for marketing needs, different titles are resorted. To understand this, we need to pay a thorough look on these concepts. The below figure will clearly show how SEO is based as a subset of digital marketing.

The SEO people are engaged in bringing the organic hits, while the digital marketers aim at total online existence (of a company) that goes beyond SEO. In practice, an SEO consultant generally looks after other areas of digital marketing. And the whole SEO digital marketing service package may be named all under SEO Packages since customers basically comprehend this more easily.

The contemporary trend includes some more services along with optimizing a website and search engine marketing. For example, there are some factors that actually take help of SEO in the sense of selecting the right keywords, such as blogging with SEO content, contextual marketing, behavioural marketing, mobile advertising, Alt-texts in banner advertising, social media marketing, RSS, viral marketing, and video content advertising. And for that a solid digital marketing and SEO strategy should be in place.

SEO – Integrated Digital Marketing

And after coming a long way an SEO is called integrated digital marketing by some marketing experts. Let’s give some light on this.

More and more, the use of SEO is becoming important for the overall success of digital marketing. And we would get a very good idea if we carefully watch the changing paradigm of SEO over years. In mid 90’s when very first SEO came into picture, manual submission, the Meta keywords tag, and keyword stuffing were all usual techniques necessary to rank well in the SERP. Then in 2004, for getting web traffic, anchor text associated link bombing, link buying from automated blog comment spam injectors, and creation of inter-linking websites took place. Then in 2011, the social media marketing and vertical search inclusion became the mainstream methods of conducting SEO. The search engine algorithms get updated time after time for the sake of bringing traffic. The tactics used in 2004 are all outdated now as the new call is something else.

Today, so many new memes totally change the way an SEO consultant once worked though the basic understanding remains the same, such as title tags, H1 tags, and everyone’s preferred subject, thanks to Google, links. But many applications that previously were remote to what we used to judge SEO no more are.

• Social Media:Social media marketing is gaining importance because of the increased usage of viral marketing approach through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yammer, and Google+. These social networking sites must be in line with the SEO best practices to entirely control SEO potential.
• The more links with a view to ranking higher is not today’s approach:The personal reputation has become a crucial aspect. Old school of link building has some improvisations. The common belief of ranking high in the search results is changing – the content strategies are not the main means, but generating the quality inbound links that stay as a much important SEO element to affect the ranking. The concept of ‘link’ is changing in that respect. The main idea behind the traditional link building to measure all the do-follow links that a website can generate and totally ignore all no-follow links. The practice was to build as many links as possible. That system had drawbacks what some black-hat marketers banked on, and finally Google changed its algorithms, which totally ended the practice of traditional link building practice. This was known as spamming. Even guest-blogging with a sole motive to generate links is also burned down. Guest-blogging really works well if it is to generate new audiences, present yourself as an expert, and engage with your targeted community.