For the purpose of this article, I am going to differentiate between “Internal” influences on your websites Search Engine rankings and the “External” Influences, let’s call these Internal SEO and External SEO- I will define each as follows:

Changes and Optimizations you make to your website directly to make it ’search engine friendly’, like tagging accurate keywords to everything from images to entire pages and also applying current industry best practices regarding Sitemaps, Robots.txt file and your website URL structure. Since all these changes will happen on the web site itself, on your side of the fence so to speak, we’ll call them Internal influences on your Search Engine Ranking. This includes, of course, good content published consistently and in a timely manner (the ‘meat’ of your website in the eyes of *all* search engines and web site visitors).

What are External influences then?

My friend Ron of Jump Start Media, a Bay Area Firm which specializes in landing their clients web message on the first page of google, and in the top spots- WITHIN MINUTES, defines “External SEO” as “The power of external links found on social networking sites, video sites and other user-contributed online media websites” to make your business message appear the MOST relevant results for ANY number of keywords of your choosing! His company uses non-Black-hat (aka- avoid at all costs!) methods and none of it is spammy, aggressive or apt to get banned/blocked by the search engines that you want to embrace! His clients are now requesting that he ‘turn off’ this system while they catch up with the flood of business it has generated for them!!

In recent times, having your website on the first page in search engines for lucrative keywords became the primary objective of many online businesses. Not all the websites going for that coveted first page result provided original content though, so the search engine came up with a new algorythm of evaluating a websites search keyword relevancy: popularity on information, social and media sites. On the Internet, “popularity” works on the principle that the more references (links) from similar websites a page gets, the more relevant it is believed to be for those keywords. “External SEO” deals with increasing the website’s popularity through innovative and practical application of generating media (content) to fit the keywords that the business is targeting. Then getting it noticed by the search engines- which is the process of distributing it across thousands of social/media networks and even if it doesn’t go viral- the influx of this type of traffic converts very well for most businesses, and it bypasses PPC campaigns entirely while achieving often much better results.

External Search Engine Optimization is now an important part in building relevant, popular websites with the goal of coming up in the first Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for the selected keywords. It’s a part of your overall web marketing efforts and is an efficient tool to get you quality traffic that will convert into sales for your marketing message. The use of online videos by companies like Blend Tec to increase their sales revenue by 500% during one of the worst recessions in recent US history is testament to the value in External SEO campaigns. This is a $300 blender after all.