There’s a lot of terms flying around in this new age of “social technology”, where companies like Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter are becoming household names. But what do any of these terms really mean and why should you care? That’s what I’ll be explaining in my weekly Tech Talk.

What does SEO mean?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the act of getting websites to show up in the search results for specific keywords on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing.

For example, it’s through proper SEO that we get Talk’s website to show up when people Google “public relations wilmington nc“.

Why is SEO beneficial?

Every month 10’s of billions of searches are being done on Google alone, not to mention other search engines. That means that billions of people are searching online for specific information, products, or services every month. If you’re targeting the proper keywords, that means that thousands of people could be finding your product or service every month, and that leads to more profits for you, or at the very least, more exposure for your brand. If you’re not targeting any keywords, however, that could mean your site is being lost in the great abyss of the web.

How does SEO work?

There’s a lot that goes into just how SEO works, but there’s fundamentally 3 parts to SEO.

1. Each website has many web pages.
2. Each of these web pages should have a few keywords being used on them.
3. Each of these web pages should have links, that carry “juice”, with the keyword for the web page its linking to being present in the link itself.
4. Link juice is the value being passed from one domain to another as determined by the search engines.

What those 4 steps describe are the following action: I am currently explaining SEO as a component of Internet marketing, in wilmington nc. With that past link, I was pointing to a web page with a link, targeting a specific term, passing “link juice” from this domain (www.talkincblog.com) to another domain (www.talkinc.com).

There is a lot more that goes into SEO than what I described above, for example, determining the competitive value of a keyword, figuring out which web pages (and domains) will pass the most link juice (since not all links are created equal), how to create a proper information architecture to improve link juice flow on a site, and more. But the above describes the fundamental concept behind SEO and how it works.

How can I use this for my business?

If you’re business is located in Wilmington and that’s where you predominantly do business, my first suggestion to you would be to focus on each page of your website (number 1 from above) to improve your on page optimization. Specifically, I would add “Wilmington, NC” to the end of whatever is in the <title> tags of your website (the title tag controls what each web page is called).