Optimizing Your SEO

Everyone's heard of search engine optimization (SEO). But outside of a few key professionals, very few people understand how important it is to website development.

“SEO is essentially the practice of making your website pages perform better in search engine results so that you draw clicks and traffic when people make queries at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Bing (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO),” Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz, told Benzinga during a recent interview.

Full Interview: Rand Fishkin Talks Google Spam, Dot-Com Game Changers, and More

Fishkin started SEOmoz to help others learn from his experiences. He also wanted to share things he encountered in the SEO field.

“I think it's changed a little bit,” Fishkin said, referring to the relationship between SEO and social media. “It feels to me like a lot of classic marketers, even people who weren't necessarily Web marketers before the emergence of Facebook and Twitter, [have] adopted the moniker of being social media marketers or social media experts.”

Fishkin said that there are people who still engage in social media primarily for the purpose of helping their pages earn links, earn rankings, and get that highly qualified traffic that search engines send.

“And then there's sort of the more brand-focused marketers who leverage social media primarily to get the message out,” he adds. “If someone sees a tweet on their Twitter stream that looks interesting, they might click it, they might visit the site, they may even browse a few pages. But they're extremely unlikely at that time to make a purchase decision or give an e-mail address or register, those kinds of things.”

Fishkin believes that social media can be extremely useful for exposing people to your brand, your story, and your product. “But I think that's why you see the disparity; social sends the traffic but very few conversions,” he said. “Search sends quite a bit of traffic but also a high percentage of converting traffic, which is why you have Google earning $20 billion a year on search advertising.”

To hear more from SEOmoz's chief executive – including his thoughts on the future game-changers of the worldwide web – don't miss Benzinga's full interview with Rand Fishkin.