Can you define SEO in a Tweet?

By Tom Kuthy, VP, Marketing & Business Development

There is an old quote that I am very fond of that goes like this: “It is simple to make things complicated, but complicated to make things simple”. In the new business world, we are constantly striving to simplify the communication of complex concepts to make them easily digestible for our audiences. This is especially true when trying to communicate a technically complex idea like SEO.

As a little challenge, before you read the rest of this post, try to quickly formulate a Twitter Tweet that describes the practice of SEO, and stay within the confines of 140 characters. Now, I am sure you will be easily able to describe the goal of SEO in a Tweet with something like this: “Move a website listing up in the natural search engine rankings”. Simple – just 63 characters.

The complicated part is explaining exactly how that goal is accomplished without starting to ramble on about search engine algorithms, quantity of authority in-links, metatags, and all sorts of other industry jargon that typically causes the non-practitioner’s eyes to roll back in their head, and a thin stream of drool to seep out onto the desk while they snooze through the rest of your presentation.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

After about one year of developing and refining Resolution Media’s SEO presentation, it finally occurred to me that there is a very simple way of explaining SEO to the layman, which makes a lot of common sense, and sets the listener up to grasp and understand the more nuanced tactics required to achieve the goal.

The following would be my Tweet in answer to the question “What is SEO”:

“SEO is the practice of creating on & off site digital content consistent with target audience search behavior and visible to search engines”

How would you Tweet in response to the question: What is SEO?

2 comments:

Fadi said...

I like your definition of SEO. I would though re-size my tweet to about 130 character to allow RT.

Aaron Goldman said...

I'd go with a more benefit-oriented statement. Tom, I'm surprised you, of all people, didn't go this route. Something like...

SEO is a method of achieving business goals by optimizing and distributing digital content.

 
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