What's all this talk about SEO?

So, a lot of people ask me about SEO. What is it? What does it do? How can people get traffic to their website?

Pretty much SEO is a short little acronym used for "Search Engine Optimization." All this really means is fixing up your site on the back-end (in the code) to be more compatible with search engines. What does this mean?

First, I am by no means a certified expert in Search Engine Optimization or Sumbission. However, I do know that there are some gorgeous websites out there and a lot of people don't even know that they exist. This is simply because when someone types in a search on Google, Yahoo search, etc., their site isn't popping up. These search engines "crawl" through sites on the Internet looking for a match to what the user typed into the search.

How come some websites aren't being found and others are? There are many answers for this. One, is that the website is not search engine optimized. To do this, a web developer or programmer simply adds key words or phrases to the code of your website. This is the first place a search engine, like Google, will look for a match. If it can't find anything there, it then crawls through the whole site looking at content on pages, link and button names, etc. Anything it can find to make that match. If keywords and content are not written to properly help a search engine out, then it makes your site harder to find.

Another reason, is that websites that are made entirely in Flash are difficult to discover. Previously, I had said that the computer looks in the actual content of your site for matches to what the user typed into the search engine. Since Flash websites are made in an extenstive animation program and are not built using text and code, search engines cannot "crawl" through them to look for the key matches.

There are many other possibilities your site may not be showing up as much as it should. Remember, there are millions of sites to compete with so even a fantastically optimized site may have a hard time. The best way I have found to get traffic to your website is to print your web address one everything - your business cards, brochures, the signature of your email, the footer of your contracts, etc. Any way that you can get your web address in front of people is beneficial to your traffic flow.