Letter from Jennifer Dunphy

Vayu Media’s VP of Marketing

Dear Visitor,

Over the past few years there has been a tremendous shift from traditional media and advertising to what is commonly known as “new media”, or online media. The digital revolution is transforming the current marketplace and at a ridiculously fast pace. You can’t read an article about marketing without hearing about SEO. There are many thoughts out there about what SEO is, and what it is not. Hopefully this article will debunk some of the SEO fallacies going around.

Search engine optimization (SEO) in its simplest form, is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or “organic” search results. Not to be confused with search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion, typically referred to as PPC. Statistics show that the higher a site appears in the search results, the more visitors it will receive. SEO can target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, social search, universal search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. The goal of optimizing a website is to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The term "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers”. These are companies such as Atlanta based Vayu Media, that carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients. SEO is an extremely dynamic and ongoing process. There are numerous pieces to the SEO puzzle and no one piece alone is enough to yield and maintain first page rankings. An effective SEO strategy encompasses all of the pieces of the puzzle and is a dynamic process. SEO can be offered as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader online marketing campaign for the highest ROI.

A comprehensive online marketing campaign should contain a strong Social media marketing strategy. This is a strategy that includes the use of social networks, online communities, blogs, forums, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing platforms include, Facebook , Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter , YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, and blog networks. Social Media marketing is a piece of the overall online marketing puzzle working hand in hand with SEO to help to raise the “organic” search engine results. As search continues to become more hyper personalized, the role that social signals play in the overall ranking algorithm will increase as well. To achieve the highest ROI in the digital world, businesses need to have a comprehensive online strategy that includes SEO, social media, PPC, display ads, multimedia messaging, online PR and online videos.

With over 2 billion unique visitors online , and predictions that by 2015, an astounding 2.7 billion people worldwide will be online, the internet is the most cost effective and efficient way for businesses to reach their target market. It is predicted that by 2013 SEO spend in the U.S. alone will reach nearly $4 billion dollars. Internet usage will only continue to rise, as consumers find more ways to access the Internet. And with mobile technology advances, millions of people are accessing the web via mobile browsers opening up even more opportunities. Online marketing is directional marketing, meaning that consumers are seeking out businesses, not the businesses seeking out the consumers. They are online looking for your products and services. The only question is; when they are looking for what you have to offer, will they find you or your competition? Many businesses are hesitant to dive into the online marketing realm. They are afraid of the potential cost. My question for every business owner is; what about the cost of loss? Can you afford not to be visible to the billions of people that are looking for your products and services online every day?