What is SEO?

Peace and happiness comes with high search rankings

Imagine you are a website. Your one goal in life is to peacefully reside atop a mountain of other websites. You want to be among the first wave to the nice folks searching for you and invite them in for a while. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gets you dressed up for the party.

So what exactly is SEO? In a nutshell, it’s a way to help search engines determine who you are and what you are about. One of the most important parts of SEO are the words you use. Research needs to go into getting the right words in your site that mesh with how people search for products and services and information like yours. Done correctly, this alone will give you a significant boost in search engine rankings.

Then there are links. Google places a lot of stock on how many websites have found you important or interesting enough to create a link to your site on their site. Getting links takes quality content and some effort. There are a ton of ways to get people to link to you. Tapping business partnerships and friends, building a cool widget, sending out press releases and reaching out to bloggers are among the more popular tactics. If you include your website as a part of your PR and marketing strategy, links will come.

Not to get technical on ya, but since these are computers there are some IT guy kinda things that come into play too: writing metatags, having good URL structure, personalized and regionalized search, crawlable navigation of categories, building site maps and adding alt tags to images are just a few.

Since the internet changes, shifts and grows minute by minute, number one rankings can’t be guaranteed. Be wary of those that promise such things. There are certain unsavory tactics some use to try and trick the search engines into boosting your site up. Rest assured, all my services are based on the most current best practices in the business.

Give me a holler if you want to discuss how SEO works in further depth.