It always makes me chuckle (OK, OK — or pull my hair out) when I hear about an online marketing company jumping on the “Content is King” bandwagon.  It’s always seemed like common sense to me, not to mention it’s exactly what search engines like the mighty Google tell you.  Here’s what you need to know.

What SEO Does

Search Engine Optimization helps get people to your website.  That means using certain tools (some of which are behind the scenes) to ensure that search engines find your content.

Why SEO is Important

Without using SEO, it’s going to be very difficult for people to find your website short of word of mouth — which is great, but that limits you to a much smaller target demographic.  SEO isn’t always the enemy of content either.  There are a number of SEO tactics that can help organize your content so that both search engines and humans can find what they’re looking for.  Here’s a good starting list:

• Use meaningful titles for your web pages and blog posts
• Use heading styles in your page content to organize information
• Use alt text for images in your page content
• Organize your blog content with tags and categories

What SEO Doesn’t Do

I hate hearing about companies that spend insane amounts of money paying a company to “optimize” their websites or blog only to find that they’re full of barely readable, uninformative, or totally banal content.  Because here’s the trick: once you get people to your website, it’s what’s on your website that converts hits into sales.

Why Content Matters

Visitors don’t care how Google found your website.  They care that what’s there is informative, personable, and representative of what you and your business are about.  Remember the old adage, “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”?  It’s still true today.

SEO + Content = Success

The best websites and blogs combine solid SEO with stellar content.  Great content shouldn’t be an afterthought or an optional add-on service.  It should be your main focus, supported by mainframe of solid SEO.  That’s how you turn potential customers into patrons.