Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You get emails about it, you read about it on chat boards and forums, you know it's what makes your site "successful" but what does it really mean?

Search Engine Optimization is the art of taking your site's content and making sure it mathematically reflects the value it offers to your target market. There are companies making huge profits by promising you THEY can get you the best results. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites that talk about it. But the bottom line is this:

You have a website, you want your website to be seen by as many people as possible. In order for your site to be found when someone searches for what you are promoting on your website the search engines (computers) have to believe that your site has the best answers to their request. Search engines are run by computers, therefore, they make determinations on black and white statistics. They don't care how pretty your site is, they don't care how well organized it is. What they care about is the math - what percentage of your site matches the search criteria? This is often referred to as "keyword relevance".

Example: If the potential customer types in Red Shoes then the search engine (computer) scan's it's database (which is constantly updated using their "robot" or "spider" technology) to find a site that has the highest percentage of the phrase "red shoes" within it's content. Keep in mind - computers cannot "read" pictures, JavaScript or flash. They can only read TEXT so all the search engine recognizes on your site is the WRITTEN WORD - which includes ALT TAGS on your images. So, if you want to be the first site listed in the results for a keyword search of RED SHOES your site has to use that phrase more times within the text on your page than anyone else on the web. That is why a site that is focused on a smaller market and carefully writes their content to address that market will perform better than a site that wants to sell to a larger market. The search engines will find a lot more sites selling "shoes" than they will selling "red shoes". It's the "be a big fish in a little pond" theory at it's best!

Also consider this, it is not just how often the word is used but how often it is used within the amount of text given. A page that has 1000 words and uses "red shoes" 10 (a .01% ratio) times may not rank as high as a page that has 60 words and uses "red shoes" 3 times (a .05% ratio).

I hear you asking yourself "well then why don't I just write Red Shoes 30 times? Aha! because then the search engine (computer) would think you were a SPAMMER. They would say "well, obviously this site has no valuable content because the ONLY words they write are "red shoes" - so, as you can see, it's a precarious balancing act. An art. But it is not an art that should cost you your first 5 years profits to master.

We do offer search engine optimization services to our customers and we do charge our standard hourly consulting fees to help them maximize their content to get the best results possible - but we DON'T believe our clients will get any better results by paying someone $5000 or even $500 per month for a company to run software that is designed to "trick" the search engines into thinking your site is more relevant than it is.

We believe in old fashioned growth and promotion of your website because we know if you build your business, just like you would a brick and mortar store, by deciding what it is you do best and doing it best then you will ultimately win.

But wait! There's more... there is one more piece to this part of your website puzzle. In order to be added to a search engine's database the search engine does have to know your website exists. To be honest, if your site is on the web long enough and has people visiting it the search engines will eventually find it on their own, that is their job, they WANT to find good results for their customers - but the way they find you (if you don't tell them you exist) is by accidentally reading a link to your site from another website that they are already aware of. This is where the "art" of Search Engine Submission comes into play. There are hundreds of search engines out there - of course there are only a few that are really important (Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, Ask.com etc). But the more computers that know they should search your site the better. We will discuss the power of "links" a little bit later in this article. You could manually submit (tell search engine companies about) your site but we have, in accordance with our basic business model, invested our time to research the many options out there and find the one that we believe is the best value to allow you to automate this process. We have chosen to partner with Submitter.net because we feel they offer the best return on investment. Their tools allow you (or us if you hire us as your consultant) to make sure your site presents the keywords you want to promote and then (based on your preferences) the software periodically submits your website url to remind the search engine computers to come and visit and review your content for inclusion in their search databases. Having used several submission tools over the years, ranging in cost from free to $49.95 per month service fees, we feel the $99.95 for the first year and $49.95 per year renewal feel is extremely reasonable.

About Links... 2nd in search engine positioning success only to keyword relevance, the number of links that refer to your website from other websites plays a huge role in search engine rankings. Many of the "SEO Specialists" will tell you that they can "guarantee" hundreds of links back to your site - this is true, they run software that sends SPAM to millions of webmasters asking to add a link to your site on theirs. They also include your site in pages like you see when you type a url in wrong and you get a page that has a bunch of random links (and most likely annoying pop up ads!). Our personal opinion of these practices is that, though they may increase your site ranking quickly, they are wrong. Based on what we're reading in our trade publications and news forums so do search engines. They are writing their software to detect this type of "link abuse" and are actually BLOCKING those sites from their directories. If you are setting up a website for a "quick in and quick out" this type of business may be worth the risk for you but we strongly discourage our clients from buying into these (usually very expensive) services.

Instead we encourage you to market your internet business in the same way you would a brick and mortar business... by networking with complimentary websites,, advertising on the internet (Google Ad Words are great! We can help.) and in other mediums, submitting articles and news to online and offline publications that your target audience might subscribe to, joining chat groups and providing better customer service than your competitors.