In an industry rift with techno-talk and acronyms, it shouldn’t be a big surprise when one encounters confusion within the scope of search marketing. After all, those of us in IT have become expert at using confusion to our great benefit especially when it comes to selling somebody something or trying to explain something in a way that no one – often even ourself – has even the slightest clue what we’re talking about.

IT people have a devious glee when they see someone’s eyes bug out and glass over when they’re trying to comprehend a point we’ve just made. But explaining the difference between search marketing and SEO isn’t in the same league as explaining the difference between ASP and PHP. It’s much simpler. So first, let’s deal with SEO.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization.  Search Engine Optimization relates to coding and proper use of tags. Tags – or meta tags – are lines of code that contain metadata about a web page. The purpose of metadata is to inform search bots about the information contained on a page. With a couple of exceptions, metadata isn’t used by people, it’s used by bots.

Most of the time, web editors like Dreamweaver insert the placeholder for these tags and leave it to the developer to fill in the information. For example, one of the few tags that does affect a website’s viewer is the “alt” tag. The alt tag is a descriptor for artwork or photographs. Alt tags are responsible for the little yellow boxes that pop up sometimes when you’re looking at a website with Internet Explorer. Those yellow boxes interface with screen readers so that visually handicapped users can “see” the content of your website.

When a developer is using a web editor like Dreamweaver, he or she will insert a photo and a box will appear on his screen asking for an alt tag to be inserted. Unfortunately, most of the times these requests are ignored and the alt tag isn’t completed. So who cares? Well, people who have vision impairments do and you do if you’d like to sell your product to everyone, including those who are visually impaired.

But the bigger problem is that Google bots can’t see it either. They are fundamentally stupid. They can’t see that nice picture of the cherry red and chrome custom Harley Davidson you are selling for $35,000. Google bots just see DSC200-1902 and that means nothing to the Google bot. And that hurts your search marketing (oops…we’re talking SEO here, right?).

There are lots of other tags nested in a website’s code that are critical to your search marketing efforts (darn, I did it again). Lots of amateurs – and some who claim to be professionals – leave off the description tag. The description tag does just what the name infers…it tells the Google bot that your website is about selling custom Harley Davidson motorcycles or whatever. Without the description tag, how’s Google going to know what your site is all about?

And there is the title tag, i.e. the page title up there at the top of the page in the blue stripe that runs across the screen. The title tag is supposed to describe the content a viewer (and the bot) will find on a page. So if you have a page listing Harley Davidson parts, your title tag should read something like “Harley Davidson parts”. Duh. Without it, Google hasn’t a clue and you lose in the artform known as search marketing.

I’m nearly to 600 words and I could write 6000 so I’ll leave the next lesson for next week. But the bottom line is that a website is “optimized” when all the tags are completed properly and the rest of the website’s structure is done in a way that is pleasing to the Google bot. And when a site is optimized, you can begin the search marketing process, which is quite a bit more elaborate. We’ll get into that as well, in the days to come.

-Gary Rawlings