What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of improving the quality or volume of traffic to a specific Web site.

How does it affect my site?

Up to 50% of all Web page visits begin with a keyword search on a search engine. A search engine is a tool such as Google that searches or “crawls” Web pages. It determines which are the most relevant to your search and returns those results to you. This is influenced by the content, quality and keywords on a site.

What can be done to help my site?

The goal for all sites is to rank number one for a given search term. For example, a Chinese restaurant would want to show as the first result for the keywords “Chinese food” in a search. While there is no way to guarantee where a page will come up in search results there are several things that can be done to provide a good result.

First, the content of your page needs to be appropriate for a given search term. This can be done ensuring all of your keywords are on your Web pages. The density of these keywords and proximity to each other show the search engines how much a search matches the content of your site.

Next are the keywords that are hidden in the page code. When a search engine performs a search it does not see what the person viewing your site does. It looks at the source code or HTML of a Web page to determine what is on the page. In this code a page title, description and keywords can be placed in what are called meta tags. When you perform a search the results you see are from this hidden information.

Finally, the page rank for a site can be influenced the most by its quality or importance of links to a site. Think of this as a spider web. One strand by itself is not very useful or important. But, when another strand is linked to it and then another and another it’s usefulness and importance improve. Like the spider web page rank behaves the same way. Your page by itself will not get great results. However, as part of a network that is linked through sites, business directories, coupons and more your visibility is greatly improved which will drive more and more customers to your site.