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| Search engine optimization, or SEO |
Search engine optimization, or SEO, has long been considered the cornerstone of online marketing. If you had a small business that people didn’t immediately recognize, and you were trying to get the most out of your company, you needed to use SEO practices in order to get people to find you online. That could mean something simple, such as using a few keywords on your site’s pages and trying to rank them on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Or it can be an elaborate process that takes multiple companies helping you to create “backlinks” to your site all across the web. SEO has become an increasingly cumbersome process since Google has become the preeminent search engine and now changes its search ranking algorithms on a fairly regular basis. What was once a strong practice is now getting significant pushback from small businesses across the country, in now small part to the high expense.
There is still a place in the world for many SEO providers, most of whom have SEO merchant accounts provided by firms such as eMerchantBroker.com. SEO companies just have to update the way that they operate. Stuffing keywords and using content farms isn’t going to immediately increase your Google rank these days. Google has become so sophisticated that now it can recognize and rewards high quality content that is totally unique. Google has an idea of what kind of content is accurate, engaging, and unique—and now it wants that content instead of what content farms provide. This means that SEO companies need to hire more talented writers, which can further increase costs.
More often, small businesses are now turning in-house. Since the content that Google wants is similar to traditional journalism in scope, companies are getting talented bloggers to create tailored content to their specific industry and using it as a blog in order to get traffic. This is likely the future of SEO. It looks like the past—link building and simply putting keywords all over the place—is coming to an end.
