There is a little misunderstanding about what SEO – Search Engine Optimization is. These days, it’s used as a blanket, covering all sorts of procedures and topics.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization means you are trying to prepare the website to show up on search engines with a top rank. In the older days, it meant structuring your code, making sure it passes HTML validation, have proper meta descriptions and keywords, and followed a certain structure. Now, it’s much more than that.
Today, in order to be competitive, you will also want to place Ads on the search engines, create social media pages, link social media pages to your website, create a google+ business listing, setup analytics and trackers from multiple search engine providers, post content on a regular schedule, get backlinks to your website from other well known and established websites and more.
Here’s the weird part, there have been cases of website code being overly optimized using things like microdata and schema.org markup, causing websites to rank lower than less optimized websites!
What we found, is a balance between HTML markup, advertising, and website content that delivers the best results. In the end, it’s a popularity contest. The amount of traffic you get, is what gets you ranked. The better the design, the better the game plan for advertising, and a solid structure for website code will get you to where you want to be.