Search marketing and search engine optimization differ from social media marketing due to the clear separation between user and publisher that the technology creates.
Social media has a people centric dynamic. If you want your message to be visible on social media channels, you need to engage with people because they evaluate and spread your content. The engagement with the user is direct with the technology essentially in the background facilitating your direct communication.
The situation with search engines is different. You provide content to be indexed and evaluated by the search engine technology rather than to other users. A user can then reference that content using the search engine technology as and when they see fit.
Publisher and audience are once removed from each other by the medium.
People and Robots
As a result of this division, if you want your message to be visible on search engines it needs to engage people, but also the search engine robots that seek out, consume and index your content in the first place.
What are Robots?
They are also called web crawlers, spiders, bots and a number of other things, but essentially robots are programs created by search engines that read your website content automatically and make a copy of it in a great big virtual index stored in a datacenter.
This index is what you see when you do a search on Google - copies of pages, not the actual pages.
So is the Google index like that in the back of a book?
Kind of. But not exactly.
Robots index content, but then Google does something an index in a book cannot do - it then evaluates it automatically and sorts it out for you based on your search term.
Search Engines as curators
Search engines act more like automated curators. They scour the web for content and index it all for future reference. Like a curator, they then evaluate and organise the content into an order of preference that they deem relevant based on what a user enters as a search term.
One way to look at a search engine is like a huge information or content museum or gallery that you can personalise to your hearts content. Each time you enter a search phrase into a search engine, you are presented with a new 'exhibition' of the best the web has to offer, organised and personalised specifically for you.
Understanding the curator's tastes
If you understand that Google uses automated processes to evaluate and curate content then you can begin to get an advantage in search marketing by understanding HOW they curate content.
To put it another way, like any art gallery curator, a search engine has its own style or taste. If you understand what the curator likes, you are more likely to get your picture in the gallery!
Automated Curation and the opportunity that offers
Understanding what the curator likes and getting it shown ion a search engine is much easier than in social media or in the offline world. This is because the factors that are used to curate your content are automated. Search Engines are machines - all be it very sophisticated ones, so their behavior is consistent at best, predictable at worst.
The goal is to work with the search engines not against them.
Help the search engines do their job.
The first step to working with the search engines is to get your content found.
With that in mind we have provided four tips to help you get your content found and indexed by the search engines. You can find that in our next post here.