What does Online Marketing mean in SEO?
Originally there were two established roots used to get traffic into a website:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - how to get a website to rank highly in the organic search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing - how to get a website to rank highly and profitably in the paid search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
The key here is in the names - "Search Engine" - because what it took to please a search engine differed from what it took to please real people in a number of ways.
Search engines liked to see a website with lots of links which lead many to purchase links by the thousand. They also used keyword densities to work out what a page was about leading to keyword stuffing and such like.
From 2011 the major search engines began to make massive strides forward in understanding user behavior better. Their ability to spot links that had no real purpose other than to be links improved dramatically.
They also built better libraries so they could connect words with the same meaning. A page may mention "car" only once but mention "vehicle" several times and in a context that meant the same as "car" was a page about "cars".
Then further factors were taken into account such as the
bounce rate and
click through rate of websites and pages. Not everyone believes this but it has certainly proved true in my opinion.
The power of individuals has changed as well. Once only webmasters with coding abilities could create links, now anyone with a Facebook page, Twitter account or freebie Wordpress account an do it.
All this has meant, increasingly, that it is no longer so much about optimizing a website for search engines as it is about optimizing a website for people.
Thus to say you are optimizing a site for search engines starts to become redundant. Really you are optimizing a site for humans and therefore for search engines.
This lead to some big names like
SEOMoz changing to simply "Moz".
As such the SEO industry has been searching around for a new title and one of these in Online Marketing which encompasses:
- User behavior analysis - in much the same way as a supermarket might study the behavior of its customers in order to improve sales, increase foot fall, etc.,
- Pay Per Click and Pay Per Impression programs as these can have an effect on the organic rankings of a site.
- Social media management because the online profiles of individuals, organization and companies can instill or reduce the confidence of users before, during or after they visit a website - effecting how long they stay, how likely they are to come back, etc.
