It's Not Just SEO, It's Your Web Presence (Part 1)

In my day to day experience working with clients, prospects and colleagues, I have noticed that certain questions have started to pop up with notable frequency. I hear things like:

"What is the future of SEO"?

and:

"What factors will be the most important in search engine algorithms"?

and let's not forget:

"How big a role will social media play in rankings"?

The truth is that there is a great deal of uncertainty in the world of SEO today. Businesses want to know how they will be affected by changes being implemented by the major search engines (especially Google), and more importantly, they want to know what steps they can take to stay relevant. So how does one continue to stay relevant? How does a business maintain pages that continue to signal a high level of relevance to search engines on their respective topics? The answer lies in this simple concept: It's not about your website anymore, it's about your web presence.

I distinctly remember a conversation i had with a colleague on the subject of web presence optimization. We didn't even call it "web presence optimization", we just knew that businesses would have to begin to look at SEO, and online marketing in general from a new perspective: One that focuses not just on their websites on their marketing initiatives, but on their web presence.

The goal of web presence optimization from the perspective of a business is to facilitate customer engagement by using every avenue available on the internet. When one takes this view, it suddenly becomes obvious that a website is but the beginning. Involvement in every facet of the internet experience today is critical to long term SEO success and overall success of your online marketing strategy.

So how exactly does this pertain to SEO? Well, search engines are in the business of providing the most relevant result to a user's query, and it is clear from the signals they have been sending that factors other than on page optimization and traditional link acquisition will begin to influence search engine rankings. Search engines are now more interested in your web presence than in your website.

In the next installment of this series, I will be going into the details of web presence optimization, and discussing examples of effective web presence optimization.