What is Search Engine Optimization and Why Does it Matter?

I once designed a business website for a friend. She is a professional organizer and after her site was complete, we had a discussion that went something like this:

Her: I want some business and now I have a website, so why is nobody calling?

Me: Because having a website alone doesn't guarantee you'll be found.

Her: But why? It seems to me if someone googles "professional organizer in [her city]" my site should come up. But it doesn't. Why not?

It's a good question (and one she found highly frustrating). The truth is, landing on the front page of the results of a Google search is no small feat. In a sea of billions of webpages, ranking among the top dozen or so for a particular search term is extremely difficult.

Don't quit your day job!

An income-producing website or blog is definitely not a "build it and they will come" type of endeavor. In most cases, getting significant traffic (i.e. visitors) — let alone enough to sustain an income — is a long, hard, time-consuming process.

So, what is Search Engine Optimization anyway?

There are many factors which determine whether or not your site will come up on the first (or 2nd, or 3rd, or 57th) page of Google's search results. Many of these factors are completely out of your control, however, there are some things you can do to increase your chances of landing in a favorable spot.

The practice of tweaking your site in an effort to get your blog or website recognized more favorably by search engines is what's called Search Engine Optimization, or, SEO.

What is indexing and why is it important?

Your SEO efforts won't matter a wink if the search engines don't know you exist in the first place. The purpose of yesterday's tutorial, How to Submit Your Site to Google, was to alert the Google spiders that your site is up and ready to be indexed. What is indexing and why is it important?

In a nutshell, when your site has been indexed, it means:

1. Google's spiders found your site (perhaps sooner rather than later because you submitted it),
2. They crawled through it,
3. They figured out what your blog is about (in part because you chose great keywords)
4. They organized, filed & stored the information about your blog's pages in their gigantic collection of indexed webpages,
5. Based on various formulas and algorithms, they determined how your page ranks among similar pages on the internet.

Over the next several days, we'll talk about other things you can do to improve your SEO, increase your traffic and hopefully build enough readership to start bringing in an income.

(Please note: I'm using Google as a my search engine of choice, but it is one of many search engines and what applies to Google does not always apply to other search engines. I use Google simply because it's the most popular.)