A Business Application of PageRank: SEO Marketing
While listening to recent lectures discussing PageRank and other aspects of the modern internet, I couldn’t help but think back to the summer after my junior year of high school. During this summer, I stumbled upon an internship opportunity where I was brought on-board as a SEO marketing intern. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and this department within many companies is dedicated towards utilizing various tools on both the back-end technical side and front-end content creation side to essentially boost the company’s PageRank.
Clearly, SEO Marketing and SEO in general is deeply rooted in a firm understanding of the contemporary internet and its various aspects such as PageRank. However, I found this article and the SEO concept in general particularly intriguing in reference to what we have discussing in the classroom because it extends our academic study of networks to the business world. As somebody interested in business, I find it really interesting that this abstract discussion of PageRank can become tangibly rooted in modern-day companies, as many companies (such as the one I previously interned for) are highly dependent on their internet platforms. Thus, these companies and in a greater sense these organizations (such as hospitals, universities, etc.) must pay attention to their own PageRank and constantly work towards refining their SEO marketing strategies to increase web traffic and subsequently improve their businesses. A final note which I find particularly interesting about SEO marketing is incredibly numerous avenues of achieving the same goal. A strong SEO marketing department will consider a wide variety of aspects, from its company’s website user experience to the quality of its content, whether that be blogs or published articles, as each of these facets and many more come together in a complex interplay within Google’s PageRank system. In sum, SEO marketing spans a wide range of organizations, from for-profit businesses to not-for-profit universities, and requires an eclectic group of SEO marketers from those with strong technical acumen to those with creative writing abilities.