How SEO is Becoming Less Techy
Search engines such as Google and Bing! use a process of relevance and popularity to decipher through web pages when a query is submitted. There are three types of queries: do, know, and go. By using algorithms, they are able to sort the wheat from the chaff (relevance), and then to rank the wheat in order of quality (popularity). So how do you provide relevant and popular content? Go back to your buyer persona that you've established, and create content that is tailored to them. In order to tailor your content, you must posses empathy for your audience and be able to see from their perspective. It is not always about the amount of traffic you bring in, but the quality of those visitors.
There are two subsets of organic SEO, technical and content. The technical aspect deals with XML sitemaps, 404 pages, 301 redirects, efficient coding and technical programming, and canonical programming. The content side includes keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, headlines, images, phrases, and formatting. Traditionally marketing firms that specialized in SEO focused on the technical side, considering it requires some intricate programming. However, once they had optimized the technical side, these SEO agencies would lose a client. Now, by also placing a heavy emphasis on continuous content updates, these agencies are able to retain customers for longer periods of time.
Link Building
Link Building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. These links are like spider webs that are all interconnected and lead somewhere. These strands of web are called links, and is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines are constantly "crawling" the web between web pages. Now see why it is so important to establish high-quality links? If your web pages are not along this web, then they will most likely be missed. Once a search engine has crawled the web pages, they are able to extract the content from those pages and add it to their depository indexes.
Of course this is not an easy process, and many businesses cheat their way out of doing it the organic way. Businesses have been known to buy links, place unrelated links on their web page, or trade links with other businesses. Unfortunately, Google is smart, and will catch you. WordPress is a company that was penalized by Google back in 2005 for playing host to pages from a third-party company that was after higher rankings. WordPress' penalty was that their home page didn't rank for it's name and it's PageRank was reduced from PR8 to nothing. Ouch!
Moz
Previously known as SEOMoz, Moz made a recent transition to expand their efforts to support marketers across all of the inbound marketing universe. SEO was no longer just about coding and technical programming, but an array of marketing tools. Moz now provides services such as Moz Analytics, Fresh Web Explorer, Rank Tracker, On-Page Grader, Keyword Difficulty, Crawl Testing, Open Site Explorer, Follwerwonk, MozBar, Moz Local, and MozCast. Some of Moz's clients include Otter Box, Razorbox, and 99designs. These companies utilize the products that Moz has to offer to optimize their inbound marketing - which integrates SEO and Link Building. Moz's job is to essentially make SEO specialists, directors, and managers lives easier.
