Learning SEO – From An Intern’s Perspective
August 6, 2012
The following was written by our intern, Jacob who started at iOVA about 2 months ago. He’s a trooper and we’ve been cramming him full of as much SEO knowledge as possible to turn him into a highly-tuned online marketing machine! -Frankly, I’m surprised his head hasn’t exploded, yet!
“The team made this seem like a really interesting service,” I thought to myself on the first day of training at iOVA Communications. From the research assigned before coming in, it seemed to me Search Engine Optimization was evolving at an incredible pace. It appeared to be an industry than didn’t even exist 20 years ago, and may not exist 20 years from now. Along with such volatility, however, comes great success. The team at iOVA continued to show me that they produce.
But does anyone really need SEO? I wasn’t convinced before interning at iOVA that they did.
Now, I understand the vast benefits SEO offers to the modern web builder. First, white-hat SEO (The form offered by iOVA) does not exploit Google’s algorithm or use any malpractice in achieving higher rankings for keywords. Rather, this form of online marketing facilitates the indexing process of Google’s crawlers. An example of this might be adding a meta description to an image that crawlers would have difficulty otherwise reading from pixels. In other words, Search Engine Optimization here at iOVA is about adding transparency to a website’s purposes and intentions for the good of Search Engines as well as users.
User experience is a core, fundamental consideration in any form of marketing. In terms of SEO, a site with strong content and organization won’t need the link farms of black-hat SEO to increase page rank. Instead, light, white-hat SEO is sufficient in emphasizing this content through link-building, On-site Optimization, and progress tracking. If you build a good site, the crawlers will come (and they’ll like what they see).
So far, this may all sound like a theoretical approach to SEO. Nevertheless, by following this formula I was able to play a role in substantially increasing the ranking of clients over a 90-day period. One specific client (which I will leave unnamed to be courteous), for example, saw nine of their keywords climb to the first page of google’s search results and four of those reach the top spot. The current status of these competitive keywords is absolutely a result of iOVA’s approach to SEO.
I’m still in the learning process here, but I feel pretty deeply immersed in it. It’s a continuous learning process due to the daily changes of Google’s algorithm. There are many layers to SEO and thousands of potential processes to increase page rank. The team at iOVA understands there isn’t one, universal process so they tailor their SEO to the needs of each client on a case-by-case basis. They convinced me of the inherent value of SEO. But the real question remains: did I convince you?
