When Google was in their research project stage, its founders used LEGO bricks to create a storage compartment for the 10 4-GB hard drives they were using to test the PageRank algorithm. “PageRank” is named after Google’s co-founder, Larry page and is the algorithm process used to assign specific website rankings for search results. Today, Google has grown to own about 70% of Internet search engine market share, which would require probably billions of LEGO bricks to compartmentalize their data servers.
Google and PageRank have allowed an effective online marketing strategy to come into fruition. This online marketing strategy, known as search engine optimization (SEO) works to improve the visibility and online traffic of a website by increasing it’s search engine ranking. The process of an SEO campaign is somewhat long-term, and takes a significant amount of work and man-power to effectively create and manage.
Although a good SEO campaign takes a lot of work, they’re among the most effective online marketing strategies, and in some cases, much more effective than traditional marketing tactics. Market research shows that inbound leads from SEO campaigns, on average, cost 61% lower than outbound leads such as cold calling and direct mail, and SEO features an 11.1% higher closing rate than outbound marketing tactics. In addition, 57% of B2B marketers say that SEO has the largest influence on their lead generation.
SEO works to improve the visibility of a website by creating high quality, and valuable content for both on and off site syndication. This process allows search engines like Google and Yahoo to recognize your website as more valuable for its viewers, therefore the organic rankings of your websites significantly improve on the search engine results page. A common way to boost the search engine ranking of a website is to write daily content in various SEO blogs. Businesses and organizations that use SEO blogs have 434% more indexed pages, resulting in more web traffic, and more leads.