SEO - EO - EO

SEO, or search engine optimization has become a hot term and a concept that has recently filtered down to the public. The concept simply acknowledges the importance of search engines in today's internet. With billions of sites online, getting noticed on the net has become a big business.

"If you build it, they will come" is not an online business plan. They WON'T come unless they either know about you, or can find you. Finding you is the major concept behind search engines.

Therefore a good online marketing plan has to include SEO in the mix. But how much and where is part of the voodoo. To achieve proper results you have to come up with realistic goals. Start by answering the following questions.

What is my business?
Where am I located?
Who is my target audience?
What makes me unique?

The basis of SEO is 'keywords'. Keywords are words that answer the previous questions and more. These days, keywords should be included in site text as well as a site's 'metatags'. Metatags are keywords that are part of your website but are not visible. They are kind of the washing instructions in the pants of your site.

Metatags aren't as important as they used to be as google and others have begun actually reading the site TEXT for relevent keywords and putting less weight on metatags. This is a great reason to blog on your site as it lets you cram relevant keywords into your text without having to splash them all over your home page.

Of growing importance is linking your site. Google in particular 'weighs' your site importance based on the 'web' of links your site belongs to. The more links to and from your site, the more relevant you must be.

Over the weekend I heard what is a growing refrain from someone elses client. I won't name names but this business owner was proudly telling me that his new web designer ensured that he would always pop up first on the search engines.

Folks, this is a bit of a snake oil sale. Lets follow the logic on this. Lets say you sell baseball cards, and your name is Card Land and you operate out of Smalltown, MI. As a web developer I can pretty much assure you that when someone types 'Card Land Smalltown MI' into a search engine that you are going to pop up! WOO HOO! That 50 bucks a month is working!

Or is it? Fact is if someone searches on your name and you are the only game in town for what you sell you are going to pop up first page REGARDLESS of whether you do any SEO or not.

Proper SEO is going to help you show up in search results when someone DOESN'T necessarily know your name, or your town name, or searches on 'baseball cards' and gets the 150 million search results with 'baseball cards' in it.

Keep in mind that everyone else is trying SEO as well including the companies who MAKE the baseball cards and you can quickly see that the blanket promise of 'Top of the Search Results' is pretty untenable.

Here's what I tell my clients. Set realistic goals. Pick the keywords you KNOW will rank you top, then pick the keywords you WANT to rank top in. THAT is where you focus your SEO effort.