Digital Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Digital Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Digital marketing. Just another one of those new, fancy buzzwords you should use to sound smart in meetings or is it the real deal?

 

Maybe a better question is: what is digital marketing?

 

This digital marketing guide will show you what’s what.

 

First popularized as a term in the early 2000’s, digital marketing has actually been around much longer.

 

Like, WAY longer. About 100 years longer, to be exact.

 

Here’s a pic of the first digital marketer in history:

 

Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they feel a page is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords (Google created a short video to explain that process). When they are deciding this, the search engines do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.

 

Links as a ranking factor are what allowed Google to start to dominate the search engine market back in the late 1990s. One of Google's founders, Larry Page, invented PageRank, which Google used to measure the quality of a page based in part on the number of links pointing to it. This metric was then used as part of the overall ranking algorithm and became a strong signal because it was a very good way of determining the quality of a page.