What is Search Engine Optimization?

by Donald Wooten

Any time there's an article or conversation about online marketing and web creation the acronym "SEO" is bound to be thrown around a few times. When I first started looking into developing my own website I saw the words enough to know they were important - though I had no idea at the time how it actually worked. Essentially search engine optimization is what lets your site be found in the vast, seemingly endless expanse of saved data skittering around the "cloud." 

Of course your business needs a website. It's a central part of brand recognition, and getting your name out there. But simply throwing up a WordPress site won't get you very far unless you do it the right way. Without showing how your website is relevant, you may be the five hundred and forty second search result when someone is looking for, let's say, "Restaurants near lincoln nebraska." 

Search engines work by rifling through the thousands of pages and finding which key words on the page are relevant to given search results. This is where SEO comes in. On the front page of your website, if you only have the restaurant name and maybe some menu items, when google scans and correlates your webpage, it will have no idea that your site is connected to an eatery of some sort or that it's in the heart of Lincoln, NE. To ensure that it does know these things, you have to put those keywords somewhere in your website - preferably visibly and often. The more hits on your selected keywords, the higher possible relevancy it's given. 

Without the proper setup and insights, putting a website up without SEO is essentially putting up a billboard in the middle of nowhere on a dead end street. The only people that are going to see it are the ones that already know it's there - or maybe, perhaps the occasional guy that turned down the wrong street. 

For a more detailed explanation of SEO, check out Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO.