Web Development versus SEO and Internet Marketing

So I’m starting to build more websites for customers, which I owe a debt of gratitude to this website for. My dream job is to do mostly web work from the comfort of my computer screen, not that I don’t enjoy doing IT. IT will always be something that I do, but I consider web development a more “higher order” concern for a business, due to the fact that a website can make a business money. Doing IT, computer repair, and building, I can only really save a customer money, which while nice, isn’t as easy of a sell as new customers. Today I thought I would differentiate between web development and SEO and Internet marketing.

So web development is what I do. I build websites for customers using common CMS technologies, like WordPress, Joomla, Drupels, and just plain old HTML and CSS. Yes I can build a website in notepad, which I did while I was in college for my “Publishing for the World Wide Web” class back in 2001, so I’m no spring chicken. I get a lot more tools and abilities using CMS technologies, plus I get the advantage of having my customers being able to create their own content, which is key to SEO and Internet marketing. Let me explain.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. This means making a website in such a way that it will be detected and crawled by the search engines in an efficient manner while still keeping the general purpose of the site evident. This includes setting up site descriptions and keywords, while organizing the site in a meaningful way. I know I’m going to raise some eyebrows with this comment, but to me SEO isn’t near as big of a deal as it used to be. From what I’ve read and heard, SEO used to be what drove the search engines. This meant, you could have a site about kittens and put a discription that the site was about music equipment and the search engines would see that desicription and think the site was about music equipment. Google changed all that with its web crawler that tried to actually figure out what a site was about. Now most modern search engines take into account the content of a site when indexing it.

Internet Marketing to me is much more important. This means marketing your site on various other sites, getting backlinks, trading links with other bloggers, blogging on other bloggers sites, and marketing in print and other media. This is the ongoing purpose of a website, to further promote and market itself to gain new customers, make new sales, etc. It takes proper SEO to market a site correctly. It also takes an easy to update site, which pulls from my web development. Ideally, you have a website that you update frequently with new content, for example a blog that you post to daily. When you post daily to your blog, and tag that post with your content categories and keywords, the search engines see that as you contributing to those keywords, thus improving your relevancy. When you are more relevant, you get higher results on the search engines for your keywords and content.

I hope this makes some sense to you. It’s something I’ve recently come to understand about web work and needs to be explained. Let me recap:

• Web Development is building and designing a website that is easy to use and functional.
• SEO is optimizing your site for visibility to the search engines.
• Internet Marketing is an ongoing movement to add content and promote that content in other places.

I hope this helps. We do Web Development. The sites we build are SEO friendly and easily indexed by the search engines. To properly do Internet Marketing, the business must be willing to contribute its knowledge to content and promote that content. By doing so, you should get a site that people can find, visit, read, and get moved to action by calling you or buying your product.

All three of these things are ongoing projects in your website. If you aren’t updating your website by redesigning the look and feel periodically, say around once a year, you are due a refresh to your site. No one likes a stale site that’s looked the same for 5 years. People like to see new design and innovation on your site. It implies that your business is cutting edge and adapting to technology changes. SEO has to always be updated for the site to distill down the most valuable thing your business does and promote that in content and keywords. This can include competitor analysis as well, which can only really be derived from an SEO perspective. Finally, Internet marketing must be done every day, or at least every week, for your content to remain relevant and in front of your customers and potential customers. By engaging in these things regularly, your website can be a very valuable business tool that can bring you business.