Branding Versus SEO
Branding versus SEO is a complicated issue for many Web business
owners who want the best of both worlds yet often have to
compromise. With traditional marketing, establishing and brand
for a company is important.
Some companies spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands
(sometime more) establishing and getting the word out about
the brand name of their product or service. On the Internet,
if you think of IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo you'll
know that a lot of money has been spent advertising these
brands.
But, what about the small business enterprise and their brands?
Even small websites want to pick a name that is memorable
and one that people will continue to seek out over the years.
But, here is where the conflict comes into play with SEO.
Search engine optimization is most often geared toward finding
the generic keyword phrases that people are looking for and
getting pages ranked well for those phrases. For instance,
there are some people searching for the brand name "Best
Buy" on the Internet, while another group of searchers
is looking for the generic term"electronics".
While SEO can be focused on just the brand name of the company,
it is also a mistake to neglect the generic terms. Many companies
have the desire to appear first in the search engines rankings
for both their brand name and the generic term.
But, many times it is not possible to do both. For instance,
in the field of electronics there is fierce competition for
this one word keyword term from many top brand name sites.
Some companies have to choose to focus on either the branding
or the generic SEO as a top priority.
By focusing on one many times good results can be had at
the expense of the other. This is because the first words
in the title tag, Keywords and Description meta tags and keyword
density all play a vital role on a page. Since, according
to Einstein, no two objects can occupy the same place at the
same time, either the brand name or the generic SEO term will
win out.
But, there is good news in that all Web business owners have
to make this same choice. Everyone is in the same boat. It
is an even playing field when it comes to branding versus
SEO, so the most important part is to pick an end of the field
and play it aggressively.
|
