Are you a CEO who needs to understand SEO?
June 20, 2008
The purpose of this article is to help CEOs understand what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about. If you run a business or are responsible for the Online Marketing activities of your organization, this article will help you level out with the SEOs you need to hire and to understand what the are talking about (and what you are spending your money in.)
Why are you spending money on SEO?
For most websites, between 75% and 80% of traffic comes through the search engines. Additionally, most people don’t even look beyond the first 2 pages of search engine results.
This means that if you don’t SEO your website to display in the first 20 positions of the search engines you are missing out on 80% of the traffic that you could be getting.
Before we go into detail let’s clarify a common misconception. When we talk about ranking in the search engines, we don’t mean you should rank for your brand or company name. Of course you also need that, but more important is to rank for what your audience is searching when looking online for a product or service you can offer.
Now, let’s look at this from a search engine point of view. The search engines send thousands of web spiders every day to crawl and gather data of thousands/millions of websites around. Why? What are they looking for?
Actually, they have a very clear purpose in mind: to find the best possible results on each keyword, so they can provide useful results to their users. If they do that, their users will keep using their services and they’ll make more money. Simple as that.
Back to us. Now that we know what they want, let’s see how we can give it to them. This is where SEO comes in. SEO is the art of creating websites that have high chances of ranking high in the search engines.
In other words, SEO ensures that websites are created in a way that the search engines will consider them useful to their users.
Understanding the following aspects of SEO is essential to understand the process and to be able to make a better decision when hiring a professional SEO to implement an online marketing campaign for your business.
Keywords
Links
The Trust factor
Usability
