Digital Marketing Breakdown: Part 1 - SEO

Welcome to the first lesson in my Digital Marketing Breakdown series.  To kick off our deeper analysis of digital marketing, we can begin by understanding our first topic, search engine optimization, and how this process might occur in an agency.

SEO can most accurately be defined as a technique used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by earning a higher ranking in the results page of a search engine.  I couldn't begin to cover the many different factors that go into increasing a site's rank, so we will look at three of the vital few.

Keyword Usage

Buried deep within the stupendously intricate algorithm that Google uses to rank page results is an analysis of keywords on webpages.  For each individual keyword searched, Google will rank a page higher if it determines that the content on that page is relevant to that searched keyword.  For example, if I were to create a website for my car repair business, I would make sure to also include keywords on my site like "collision repair", "auto repair", or "local car repair shop".  It helps to think about what terms you might search if you wanted to find that information.

URL Creation

This step is extremely obvious, and yet so easy to forget about.  When developing the name of your site, it is critical that the URL name makes it easy for people to understand what your site is about.  The URL "www.worldsbestrollercoasters.com" makes the purpose of your site obvious to Google and your potential site visitors as well.  

If your website contains few pages, it would be valuable to spend some time making sure that other links on your site are easy to understand as well.  "www.worldsbestrollercoasters.com/cedarpoint/milleniumforce" is much more relevant than a combination of numbers and letters that appear as the default for that page.

Links

While it can be beneficial to your readers if you provide a link to another source on your own page, including these outbound links to your site may not be directly optimizing your site.  On the other hand, it is quite valuable for another page to link directly to your site.  Links from third parties to your site indicate to Google that your link is relevant, and links from sites with supreme authority (espn.com, ehow.com, nytimes.com, etc.) can be game changers.  Building a network of trustworthy, relevant links is tough, but it's extremely beneficial for SEO.

If this topic interests you, I would strongly recommend checking out the University of Michigan - Dearborn's Digital Marketing program.  The Digital Consumer Search and Marketing class will teach you much more about SEO, as well as other extremely valuable tools necessary for earning your digital marketing degree.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, visit Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO for an excellent resource.  Check back soon for the next post in my Digital Marketing Breakdown series!