SEO

Yah, I’m titling this “seo.”  Verbose, isn’t it?

Today, I’m about to embark on a 50 blog post journey writing about “SEO” which will help me confirm my thoughts about blogging.  Moreover, this is my attempt to bring the focus back to a blog that didn’t have a “plan” at the beginning and was more about random thoughts on seo, facebook and other elements to internet marketing rather than sticking to some of the original goals.

So, what were those goals?  At first, it wasn’t clear, but an obvious goal would be having GREAT clients come to this blog and started calling me and saying “Brandon, could you help us with our website rank on Google and ultimately improve it’s traffic?  We’ll pay you millions of dollars.”  Seriously, you don’t have to be paying me or my firms millions of dollars, but helping us put food on the table would be nice.  

In order to see if we can bring the focus back to this site and the blog, I’ve decided to blog about each and every keyword phrase that shows up in the “most relevant” list that google spits back at you for the main phrase “seo” with the keyword tool.  The next phrase we’ll be blogging about is “seo basics.”  The top 5 phrases that are related to “seo” are (according to google’s keyword tool):

1. seo basics
2. seo tools
3. what is seo
4. seo companies
5. small business seo

Oh, this is if you search for them in the “broad” sense of the word searches.  Google defines “broad” searches as: “The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words.” I prefer “exact” and if you do resort this list by “exact” terms, it’s defined as: “The search volume for that [exact] keyword idea,” you almost get the same exact list except:

“small business seo” rises to #4 and “seo book” takes over the 5th spot.  Normally though, the differences may be more significant between “broad” vs. [exact] via the keyword tool, just fyi.  And what’s “seo book?”  It’s not just people looking for an “seo book”, but rather, it refers to a very popular SEO website.  It’s a site that this guy named Aaron Wall hosts and has been doing seo for many years.

Getting back to the focus of this post…so I’m trying to change the top 10 keywords that are bringing traffic to my site to match my goals above.  So, what are the keywords that are currently bringing traffic to the site right now?  They are:

1. seo eye care
2. wochat
3. seattle seo
4. seattle organic seo
5. did facebook buy myspace
6. facebook buys myspace
7. shuffle people
8. seo seattle
9. chatroolet
10. wocchat

So, #’s 2, 7, 9 and 10 are all related to chat roulette and are bringing traffic to my site because of a few silly posts I wrote earlier.  The impetus behind them was that I learned what “chat roulette” was after finding it on Google’s Zeitgeist (an  end of the year top keywords trend survey).  Another silly post brings in a lot of traffic because of a silly idea that Facebook might of bought Myspace which you can see is NOT true given their recent purchase for a HUGE discount at $35 million.  Newscorp bought the social networking site for  $580 million in cash back in July of 2005.

However, despite my outbound links even with this post which have very little relevance to SEO, I’m going to do what I can to “reel back in” the folks who do care about “search engine optimization” as much as possible.  I want to rank more for phrases like “bellevue seo” which we do o.k. at this point being on page 1.

I’m going to end today’s inaugural seo post by saying “SEO” should not be distinguished from “sem.”    It’s become commonplace for people to call the organic part of search marketing “SEO” and the paid side or part of the industry “SEM” when I believe seo should be a part of “SEM.”  It’s funny how we’re not letting semantics get in the way (when it finally should) of truly defining the industry, but letting just speakers and authority figures in the business define it.  In it’s true sense of the acronym, “SEM” stands for “search engine marketing.”  Well, SEO is a part of “search engine marketing” (IMHO) and “PPC” in my opinion is what is actually “SEM.”  It just doesn’t make sense except the fact that old school SEO’s and even PPC “gurus” kept on calling the pay per click (ppc) marketing “SEM” when it’s just PPC.   Just my 2 cents about differentiating PPC from SEO and from SEM or being a part of SEM.

Oh, and to round off this post, but “SEO” is search engine optimization, if you haven’t heard the 3 letter acronym before.  In my words, SEO is the process of following the rules that search engines establish to get a website to rank higher in their search engine results pages.  The ultimate and logical way to list or rank the websites according to the search engines is by determining if they (the sites) are “relevant” for the keyword phrases that people use to search for a specific topic.  To define if they are “relevant”, I’ve written about some of the “seo basics” in this post called Best SEO Tip** (which leads you to the “2 C’s of SEO“).

**The post should probably be called “best seo lesson” vs. “best seo tip.”  However, I called it the best seo tip because it is a tip in that you better understand the basics behind seo before moving forward in trying to find the best levers to move the ranking dial in google or other potential search engines moving forward.