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What is SEO in digital marketing? What are some of its important parameters?

The world going digital is nothing new. It had to, given the cost and quality aspects for which this medium is nothing less than a god-send. But then with great technologies come great technicalities that one needs to fulfill to make good use of the technology. SEO in the domain of Digital Marketing is one such technicality which though known to all, still needs to be explained every once in a while. One likely reason for this constant repetition could be that though it may sound sensible and easy, it could be difficult for a group of people given to picking and placing text at will (yes, the cut & paste variety aren’t exactly laborious or original for that matter).

Here we try and explain in very simple terms what SEO in digital marketing is all about and what are some of its important parameters.

Also read: How to choose digital marketing agency for your business

To understand the use of SEO, try imagining yourself swimming in a pool full of sharks! Sharks, as is known aren’t particularly gifted with great eyesight. To get to its prey, it relies on its keen sense of smell which gets even more activity where there is blood flowing in the water! It wouldn’t touch a mannequin of your size how-much-so-ever hard you try. Smear it with blood and the story could be very different.

Something similar is the case with the digital shark which takes us to our query, our find. We call it the search engine. And to optimize its search and lock-on capabilities, one needs to similarly smear every written article on a net with something blood-like. You could call it blood-word. To the world, they are “key-words”! Put them in the correct order and in the right numbers, your search engine locks its sensors to your content and in the process derives your website/ content’s rating in terms of ease of search.

This leads us to a rather lame question. How do you arrive at key-words? Every idea on the net can be defined and described by a set of words. These could either be synonyms or words which put together describe the idea or object to the nearest extent. Some of these keywords need to be paid for. Others could be free. Using these words in the text which could be website words, blogs, social media posts or any written stuff on the net, you create the hook which attracts search engines to your content.

If you think SEO for any content is easy, well it certainly could- provided you adhere to certain rules like:

Judicious use of keywords. Agreed you want your content to be rated and rated fast. But does that mean you write the same word again and again and again- without any consideration to the flow of the content and its meaning? Doing so gets you a negative rating because your content does not communicate anything and in fact, holds back the rating of other serious content. The best strategy would thus be to have a very vast collection of keywords of which a handful which finds the maximum hits, are used. The rest, can be used where the situation so demands.
No plagiarism. If you still think your “cut and paste” trick will do the needful, well it will! It will take your content to the bottom of the pile and you could even be black-listed from most search engines for stealing content. Where the content for genuine reasons needs to be the same, give citations and references so that you are not accused of stealing.
Keyword should be relevant to your content. And this includes your descriptions, meta-tags, website URL…in short everywhere on the net under every circumstance! Try and use words which find application in every sphere be it the article/ URL/ description or meta-tags. Things automatically get standardized and make things easy where are change has to be made. Also, keywords should relate to your content. If the keyword is “sea” and your content describes mountaineering, it would most obviously not match.
Change is the essence of longitivity. A set of keywords should always be kept handy even though not all of them may be used. Rotating keywords every few months is a good way to keep the articles alive as the search-engines rank content based on freshness.
Cleanliness of content. Be it a website, blog or even a social media post, try and keep everything neat and tidy with pictures and videos being at the right place and content properly written and subdivided into paras. Just writing pages upon pages upon pages gets you nowhere as it reduces readability and interest of the brousers!

These are the few important parameters which if adhered to in your content, your SEO ranking is sure to go thru the roof!