CHAPTER 9
Driving Traffic and Measuring Success: Search Engine Optimization and Analytics
No discussion of online marketing would be complete without talking about search engine optimization (SEO) and website analytics. Both areas can be confusing, yet both are powerful tools for your firm and its marketing strategy. This chapter will examine both.
Let’s discuss SEO first.
RANKING HIGH: SEO
Put simply, SEO is doing certain things to your firm website that will increase its chances of showing up in an organic, or unpaid, web search. Sounds great, right? Of course you would like your firm to show up above your competitors when potential clients are searching for the services you provide. The challenge comes in the “doing certain things” part of that definition. What exactly are these “things” of which I speak?
The Evolution of SEO
Nearly as long as there have been websites and search engines to help us find them, people have been trying to figure out ways to ensure that their websites show up near the top of the list of search results. Depending on who you talk to, it’s either a smart strategy to get the most from your website investment or a way to game the system. At first, the search engine “spiders” (a program that “crawls” the web finding and indexing websites for search engines like Google and Yahoo) could only “see” the text on a website, so websites that had the most searched-for words on them would get ranked highest. It didn’t take long for SEO experts to realize that the ...
Get Take Your Marketing Online! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
