SEO, SEM, & Online Reputation Management
Whether you’re a web designer or own a website for your business on the internet, having a solid online reputation is a big thing in the industry. One thing that a lot of people forget when building a website is having the proper tools to help grow and expose the site to others. There are many different options and tools to help your website become more easily available and have more traffic. This is important because it ultimately determines how well the website performs.
With something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the traffic and accessibility of a website can be improved. SEO occurs when a website or page’s certain keyword when searched, brings up that specific website in priority to others through numerous search engines like Google, Bing, and Ask. So as an example, if my website had good SEO, visitors would see that the first website that appears with the search results after typing “Jaimee Pappas” would be mine. Websites with a domain or keyword that is very common can result in more competition with having good SEO because there is always a need to be the best result. SEO is probably the second most important thing about a website, aside from the actual website itself, because the traffic is the result of the search engine’s commercialization.
So how exactly can someone have good SEO? Some ways that a person can maximize SEO is through the specific words in the website that would be most, if not exactly, relative to what is being searched. If someone online searched the term “designer”, a music video by Lil Pump called “Designer’ would be the most relevant thing because of the use of the exact words, and the least relevant sites such as Bloomingdales and other shops would appear lower. In more technical terms, you can ensure good SEO by ensuring a keyword-rich URL, making sure that no content is in the mix with rich media, creating keyword-driven content consistently, and keeping any text that would be sort of like a caption outside any content. That way, if someone looks up a certain phrase or word, it could match a caption of the content posted on your site easily. Search engines are the main source of traffic and SEO is the tool that helps us do so. In recent statistics, Google sends websites a whopping 90.62% of traffic. This should be enough to tell you why Search Engine Optimization is so important.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing), is a way of online marketing through promoting and increasing the exposure of a website through paid advertising. SEM has a strong connection to SEO because with the two working together in a website, not only will the website have a continuously increasing amount of visitors, but the website will also be able to make money off of the ads. SEM is one of the best online marketing tools for businesses and companies. The search results using this become the most direct, in front of the line of all the non-paid search results, so it can be a great advantage.
There are hundreds of jobs available in any area regarding SEO and SEM. Usually but not always separated from web design jobs, SEO/SEM jobs have harsher requirements in terms of education and experience because of how in-depth and complex it is. Most companies look for someone with a minimum of 2 years of experience in SEO and either a solid master's or bachelor's degree in the field. It is not an easy field to get the hang of and there is a lot of information to know about it, so it’s pretty reasonable to have high expectations.
Employees with jobs associated with SEO are ultimately responsible for different online marketing strategies either for a client or the company, to completely execute their goals. This is done through promotions and ads that bring out a message to the target audience, which is where the SEM comes into place. An entry-level SEO employee can expect to make about anywhere from $35,000 to $65,000 a year. A lot of jobs in this field, I’ve noticed, feature companies that give great benefits. I did a job search for “SEO” in Indeed.com, and more than 5 pages of results have appeared. I would say that if anyone is worried about trying to find SEO jobs out there, DON’T WORRY because if it isn’t listed on a website, chances are someone who owns a business will need you (there’s usually hundreds of jobs for it though.)
With that being said, there is so much I can only cover on SEO and digital marketing in this small little piece of information. There really is so much involved with SEO and SEM and I have to say, it takes dedication and knowledge.
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