Website Optimization And Search Engine Optimization

In a post titled 7 Great Reasons Why Website Optimization Should Not Be Confused With Search Engine Optimization, Rich Page pointed out that website optimization and search engine optimization are not one and the same.

We all know what search engine optimization is, or at least we all think we do. Wikipedia defines search engine optimization as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

So what then is website optimization? What Google calls website optimization, I call conversion optimization, making it much less likely to be confused with seo.

What I can’t figure out is what is it about search engine marketing that leads people to call every sub-category of what they do for a living whatever they feel like?

This goes far deeper than the confusion between website optimization and search engine optimization. That one is only the tip of the iceberg. I mean why stop there?

The way I see it, the entire genre (search engine marketing) falls under the top-level category, Internet Marketing. Maybe that’s not as good of a plan as I originally thought because in the beginning, Internet marketing was all the borderline sleazy stuff, like Internet guru peddling, affiliate marketing, and of course, sales pages that made you scroll down till your scrolling hand got tired. Although the term Internet marketing certainly started off that way and still includes the aforementioned so called gurus, to me at least it seems to work as the top-level phrase for the genre. In other words, while seo, website optimization and pay per click all seem to me to be subsets of search marketing, also called search engine marketing

Because we’re not marketing for search engines, but rather for websites, it might be better to call it website marketing. Lets see what Wikipedia has to say about Internet Marketing.
Internet marketing, also referred to as web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.” So that didn’t really help at all because now we have web marketing, online marketing, and emarketing to deal with.

So why not try interactive marketing? Wikipedia defines interactive marketing as “the evolving trend in marketing whereby marketing has moved from a transaction-based effort to a conversation. Interactive marketing is the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us.”

With the current obsession withsocial media, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call the “top level” phrase for the Internet Marketing genre interactive marketing.

Takeaways

A rose, is a rose, is a rose. Things are what they are no matter what you call them.

Actually Shakespeare said it best when he had Juliet say, “What’s in a name anyway? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

In the end what matters is what something is, not what it’s called.