What is Digital Asset Optimization?

Digital Asset Optimization is a somewhat new term to describe what many SEO specialists have been driving toward for a while now.

Here’s a quick video of my explanation of what it is.  Read on below for more details.

To start with, let’s remind ourselves of what SEO is.  I originally wrote that there are a lot of definitions out there, but let’s go with my definition of SEO.  (After all, this is my blog.)  It is written below.

As a verb:  “The art and science of increasing the volume of significant and profitable traffic from unpaid results on search engines.”

As a noun:  “Those that perform the art and science of SEO (as listed above).”

In the definition above, note that we are talking about search engines and traffic.  Generally speaking, it was done on web pages.

But just in the last six months, we are now realizing that search engines don’t just rank websites.  With blended search, universal search, or whatever you want to call it, we now are finding more and more other things showing up on search engine results.  These could include images, videos, local results, and just about anything else, including Tweets, LinkedIn profiles, etc.

So the need now is not just to optimize web pages, but optimize all our “Digital Assets”.  To take it a step further, we need to optimize them not only for search engines, but for social media and many other things.

SEO is now part of DAO.  So what’s next?

Don’t just think about web pages.  Think about optimizing everything you do online (all your digital assets).

Also, don’t just think about search engines.  Google used to drive most traffic on the web.  Now, they are just one of many players, most importantly social media (for now).

Interestingly, Mike Grehan wrote a great piece on DAO this week.  Mike has been working with SEO for years and is just brilliant.  Lee Odden has also been writing about DAO.

I had a great conversation with Donna Maria and she could not resist the urge to create a brief YouTube video on the subject.  Thus, the video above.

Let me know what you think.  Is DAO becoming more important than SEO?

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