For me 'making websites' began with something like web design: making a website with a nice graphical design. Of course I also tried to put some useful information: ex-dividend dates of shares trading on the AEX (see our site http://www.aandelenkalender.nl).
Then I moved to The Philippines and kind of by accident started Active Discovery Designs, still with the idea of making nice, useful websites, but especially graphically nice.
Of course over time I heard about things like 'SEO', but I never liked it:
- I don't like things like 'sales and marketing'.
- In my mind SEO companies were kind of 'cheating' by creating artificial traffic with all kinds of sneaky things.
Then, over time, I started to realize that most of the Internet is about marketing and that 90% of the content on the Internet is about 'being found'. Most basic sample is the very text I'm wrting now: my main reason to write it is of course that I hope that other people will read it. And of course I can point people to this article by just informing them about it, but how nice would it be if people just 'accidentally' found it when they were looking for information about 'SEO' or 'being found on the Internet'. And how would this article be 'found' on the Internet: exactly, by searching for articles about 'SEO' and 'Internet marketing' with a search engine, or, from a practical point of view, with Google as they still seem to have (much) more than 50% of the 'search market'.
So over time, next that we developed regarding 'how to make websites and web applications', I started to realize that websites, in general, need to be found in order to be useful. Next to that, being a web development company, customers, especially the more knowledgeable, are starting to ask about our 'SEO services'.
So then, of course, with my technical mind, I started to do some research about 'SEO', even though I didn't like it, as in my mind what so called 'SEO companies' are doing, was, and probably mostly is, 'cheating search results'. Also in my mind was that of course I wanted to offer a 'SEO service' to my customers. However, I wanted to offer something more than 'give me some keywords and we'll make sure your site will rank on top of Google with these keywords'. In my mind, especially for business websites, it's not about the traffic or 'being found' or 'being on the first position or page in Google', but it's about selling more.
And this is what the title of this article is all about: I don't want to sell a simple SEO service (although I'm starting to find out even simple SEO is becoming very difficult or at least time consuming), but I want to help my customers sell more using the Internet. And that brings me to my final conclusion, which is that SEO to me is not about 'Search Engine Optimization', but goes much further as it's all about 'selling more', meaning 'sales strategy' meaning Internet Marketing.