Help Google help you: Optimizing your online content

What is SEO?


Sometimes I want to eat an amazing Philly Cheesesteak sandwich (I capitalized it because it deserves all the respect it can get). Even though I want that, There are thousands of other restaurants and vendors out there that distract me or clog up my ability to find a good Philly Cheesesteak. Good SEO is like putting a Philly Cheesesteak street vender outside my front door. It's what I'm looking for and it was easy to find. If people are looking for something on the internet but it's not easy to find, they usually give up. Getting the info people want however, takes good SEO practices.

As funny as it sounds, search engines like Google need you to "optimize" your content so that they can find it and give the people what they want!

Think about it. When you post something to Twitter or Facebook, how long after you post it does it get lost in the mess of hundreds of other posts? If you're lucky you'll get people that retweet or share your content but at very very best links from Twitter and Facebook last about 3 - 4 days (If they're linked to a viral trending video or topic). If you can effectively optimize your content so it's showing up in multiple places when people are searching for content similar to yours you can create a solid flow of traffic.

Hitting your target audience


This is one of the main reasons people use SEO. There are thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of people out there that may be interested in your content but the vastness of the internet blocks them from finding it. Using keywords that people search for is another thing you need to focus on. If you can get optimized with certain keywords your blog or website is going to see traffic that you don't even have to work to get.

There is a huge advantage to gaining more hits on your site because you can turn those people into future clients or moneymakers for your business. Monitor which keywords are driving the traffic to your site and which ones aren't. Change things around and try new keywords to see what your maximum traffic driving keywords are. It is a game. It's not a game that you can just put on pause and come back to where you were when you paused. You have to keep playing, monitoring and improving to make sure your content is being found by those people who want to find it.

So get out there and "optimize" your content, otherwise I don't care to read it.