What is the definition of search engine optimization

Search engine optimization. What a mouthful. What's it mean and why should you care?

Search engine optimization--or the short term--"SEO"--makes or breaks a website.


For example, you own a successful health foods store in Raleigh, NC. You're encouraged by the growth of your business and want to add revenues by selling your supplements online. You go to Google or Yahoo and search on "health food stores raleigh, nc" expecting to see your business listed in the "search engine results pages," or SERPs as they called.


Oops. You're nowhere to be found. What's up with that? You are in Raleigh, you are a health food store, so how dumb is Google?


Unfortunately, your webmaster forgot one final important step: optimizing the site for search results. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have rules you must follow. If you don't know what these rules are, give us a call.


Here's a short answer: each web page has a title. This needs to accurately reflect what the page is about. None of that "for excellence in superior widgets, call ABC Company." Too vague. Each web page has words and phrases that appear only in the programming code. They are called meta tags. The meta tag called "description" is critical. It must be a concise, brief summary of what the page contains, and include words or phrases from the title for best results.


Your website content (that's the text on the page), must contain the words found in the title and description and be written in natural sentence structure. Write like you're talking to your grandma. Don't repeat a keyword 15 times just because you think you'll fool Google and get better ranking. Forget it.


Google could care less about images. So if you paid a ton of money for a fancy flash intro that requires the visitor to "skip this intro" to get to your site, you just threw your money out the window. Same for billboard-sized graphics of smiley employees or happy workers on their cell phones. Ditto for menus that feature goofy buttons that change color when you put your mouse over them.


One more critical component of SEO: fresh content. You need to update your site frequently with fresh content, add pages, tweak, tweak and tweak again until you are getting the results you need.

Remember, only 1% to 3% of your visitors will convert to customers.


Give us a call if you'd like some professional SEO consulting!