The SEO Universe

SEO - Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to get noticed on the web. And from a very limited view, that is what SEO is. But the further you dive into the inner workings of what it takes to get noticed on the web, you begin to realize that there's more to it than that. I see SEO not as a optimizing for search engines, but taking control of your (the client's) part of the universe.

Think of web presence as a universal model. The universe is the web; the bigger celestial bodies (websites / web presence) will attract the most planets (people / visitors). The bigger something is, the more gravity it has, ergo the more planets revolve around it. The same goes for the web. The more presence you have on the web and the better quality content you have, the more people will gravitate towards it. What the result is, is several clusters of giant celestial bodies that control their area of the universe (the web) while smaller stars revolve around them, and those smaller stars eventually find their own group of planets that gather around it and thrive on it. I refer to stars as web presence because just saying website is too narrow-minded and the point I want to make is your presence is everything on the web, not just one thing.

What most all search engines allow you to do is gather as many visitors as you can, and make yourself bigger; basically compounding your size to give you more gravity. But in order to gain more visitors, you have to strive to be as big as your competition. All things being equal, the bigger your star, the more likely you'll grow. Size requirements are controlled by what your star is for. If you're a local business, your star has to compete with the other business stars that are also local, which means you can get away with being a red dwarf, because they're not that big either. You might not be as big as Amazon (Betelgeuse, a star bigger than our sun), but you don't need to be because you have your own local market. But if you want to go up against VY Canis Majoris (largest star in the known universe), you'd better be just as big. So do you just need a big star for the sake of having one? No, there's more to it than that. Web presence is like the various elements that make up a star; a good mixture and balance will having you shining bright, a bad one means boom! and a few planets disappear. So what's the right mixture? Let's talk about our elements first.

Little pieces of you exist all over the web. Every social media website, every blog post, every picture, everything is just one more piece of you that exists out there somewhere. These little pieces are the various elements that determine whether your star shines as bright as the next one. And to help that, you first must take control of them because one wrong element can hurt you. Wrong meaning, if wrong information exists about you like an address for a business or a phone number, the more caustic your mixture will be. But if you control all these different pieces and bring them together, the easier it is to glow. Wrong also means the quality of your elements. You don't want to combine trash to make a star. By trash I mean bad content that has nothing to do with your star, and nothing to do with the planets you want to revolve around it. Give planets what they need to survive and prosper; the reason they revolve around your star. Give your star enough trash, it'll turn supernova and result in a black hole of which nothing can escape (search engines will slam you) and your part of space becomes empty.

This is what SEO is now. It's the mixture of your star. The mixture used to involve the technical details trying to present itself to the universe in such a way to gain approval, but now its the planets that have the power. That's not to say the universe doesn't play a part, because it does, but the universe cares about the planets and what they need to survive.

So how do I create my star? How do I figure out just the right mixture? Like combining elements in a laboratory, you need to know what you're doing, or you need to consult a scientist (SEO engineer). But unlike the perfection that is combining elements together to form atoms and molecules, there's no perfect formula to creating a star. But a scientist can't do it alone, we only know how to combine the elements once we have them, we can't create them for you (we can but we're not experts at what you do). The elements are your content; what your web presence will be about. If you're a business, you know your business and your industry the best. Thus, working with a scientist in creating the elements is the best way to create a shining star. Do you have 3rd party listings in various directory sites? Those are elements. Do you have a Facebook page or Twitter account? Those are elements. And your scientist needs to know about them all, and more importantly, you need to know about them and take control of them.

Scientists may not have perfected the formula, but we can measure the quality of your elements and get a good idea. Here's what we figured out so far: content of your web presence, amount of content of your web presence, consistency of the presence, people who link to your presence and how often your presence changes. These are the elements you can control and influence, the rest is up to the scientist.

It's the scientist's job to take all those elements and combine them into a star. The star can be just one website or a website plus advertisements, or it can just be a Facebook page. Whatever it is, your path to shining means being proactive about controlling your part of the universe.