Marco Polo SEO

Rather than throwing out some academic definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I’ll sum it up as this: Think of the Internet as a big swimming pool of people playing Marco Polo. The person yelling “Marco” is looking for some sort of information using a search engine and the ones yelling “Polo” are all the possible search results. Only in this game, the one yelling “Polo” the loudest gets tagged first and wins.

It’s not hard to up the volume on your website or blog’s SEO. Playing by some simple rules when writing a news release, website, or anything else purposed for the web, can help all those people yelling “Marco” find you.

While search engines’ goal is help users find exactly what they’re looking for, they are merely robots and need help knowing which online sources are experts. They rely on the text of any given web page, placing importance on the words at the top of the page, URLs, anchor text, page summary text and more. Making sure these key areas are clear and hold important phrases is paramount to making sure the Marcos of the internet find your Polos.

Of course, some key phrases have multiple meanings. For example, someone searching for images of the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo mostly will find drawings of the historic figure … and this slightly off-topic image that does have “Marco Polo” in its URL.

-- Alicia DeMatteo