Search Engine Optimization

You cannot learn everything in college. This is something I have learned the hard way nearing the end of my senior year. Today we had a senior luncheon with members of the Dicke board and the biggest thing they told us is do not be afraid to work. There is an issue where people wanted to balance their home life and work life and it made it so the corporate work was pushed off. The next generation has to be willing to work, and not just while at work but take it home. I see this first hand with my brother he works 120 hour paychecks. He is working so much his bosses have already had a meeting with him about burning out. This is something I am willing to do purely to get out of debt sooner. It is no secret that ONU is expensive to attend and I already planned on trying to have a serving job a few nights a week. It is a scary concept to keep going all the time. I learned that at my internship where I got up at 6 pm and got home at 6 pm. What I did not learn from my internship was search engine optimization also known as SEO. In fact, I have not learned this at all. The only reason I know about SEO is it was a department at the company I worked for and my older cousin discussed how half of their marketing budget goes to it. How is it that companies are spending half their budget on something we are not learning in school? So here is the bare basics of SEO in hopes you can answer an interview question.

Search Engine Optimization is used to grow organic (non-paid) search engine results. Every time you Google something the first few will most likely be paid ads and will state that. The goal of SEO is to bring your company to the top of the list right after the paid ads. For your site to show up at the top of the search you should have the right words, links, and sometimes just a site that search engines can read easier. You need SEO because you want potential customers to visit your site. The second page of Google is not the right place to be if you want to be seen. Some customers (like me) do not trust the paid results and will skip to the organic results.

The biggest thing is make sure your site has the words that potential customers will search when looking for your product. The more common works the more likely they will find you. This includes tagging images. That is a big thing when finding companies is their images. Include locations, dates, little details of the picture like specific colors. Anything that will make your company stand out when people search on search engine sites.

I hope this gave you more background information than you had. Maybe you are now interested in learning more about SEO. Have any history with SEO I'd love to hear about it!