If you’ve followed our blog for a while, thanks!, and if this is your first time here, welcome aboard! Either way, we get so wrapped up in our corner of the SEO world working for clients all over Northern Virginia (in places like Reston, VA and Washington DC) that we sometimes forget to take a step backward and explain it all from the beginning. So here it goes….SEO described as a road map. Keep reading, you will understand.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of luring traffic (visitors) to your website. Website visitors are referred to as “traffic” so think of this entire process as a large map…an atlas if you will. The Internet in its entirety is the giant atlas book — you know, the one that you’ve forgotten even existed since the creation of online mapping tools. After opening the atlas, you need to figure out how to get from Aspen Hill, MA to Reston, VA, but where do you begin? The index.
The index in this case is the search engine of your choice (probably Google, Bing or Yahoo!). After looking to the index, you locate your current location (Aspen Hill, MA) and then look for where you want to go (Reston, VA). When you find your destination, you then can figure out how to get there.
Using the atlas analogy, as you scour the different routes to get from point A to point B. You may decide you’d like to get there as quickly as possible and take an Interstate, but you may also want to take the more scenic route and visit some quaint antique shops along the way. For this exercise, we are saving money and skipping the shopping…at least for now.
Entering your final destination (which is Reston, VA) into the atlas (Google, Bing or Yahoo!) will tell you where you need to go. This is where SEO comes in. When looking at the atlas, you see many different roads all depicted using different colors to signify the type of road it is. For example, a bold red line may be a highway, whereas a think blue line may be a dirt road. Think of SEO as the color-coding of the Internet.
SEO is nothing more than a way to aid visitors (traffic) in finding your location (final destination of Reston, VA). Search Engine Optimization is a group of colorful road signs that you can’t see but your atlas (Google, Bing or Yahoo!) can which helps you get to where you want to go quickly. Isn’t the Internet smart?