Search Engine Optimiation, or SEO for short, is a word in the web design business that you will hear over and over again.  Simply put, SEO optimized is making sure that your site is designed and optimized so that the search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more, are able to find your site, and add it to their listing of sites when people are searching for companies just like yours.

SEO is extremely important.  Not having SEO is like having a party and not sending out any invitations or directions!  Once you build your website, you have to tell the search engines that it exists, and then make sure that anyone searching for your services finds your website.

There are different levels of SEO.  You can do it "just a little", or you can do it "quite a lot". The difference, of course, depends upon how much time you have and how much money you want to spend.  Believe it or not, there are individuals that are in dedicated jobs just doing SEO for companies!  

As a small business, you will want to find a balance of both time and money. However, how much money/time you invest depends upon the business that you do and the purpose for your website. For example, if you are a professional that wants a website for credibility but you really don't want to attract clients, then you need to spend very little on SOE.  On the other hand, if you have an ecommerce store and you are hoping to sell your products, then you will want to have a high budget for SEO.

The magic formula for each search engine is not one that is published!  Web designers can research the guidelines of each search engine and find out what criteria they require, but there are no guarantees that you will reach a number 1 position!  There are, however, general rules of thumb for us to follow:

Meta tags

Make sure that your pages have meta tags, and that they are set for each page that you want the search engines to display.

Site Map

Make sure that you have a site map available to search engines, and that the information in it is accurate and true.

Content

The content ("words") that you put in your site is very important!  You want to make sure that you have words say what you want the search engines to pick up!  For example, if you are a dog trainer in your town of Springfield, you will want the words "dog", "trainer", and "Springfield" repeated in your content as much as possible.  This creates a consistency in your content, and it helps the search engine figure out what is important.

Tools, such as Webmaster Tools, Analytics

You need to understand where your traffic is coming from, and what a search engine sees when it looks at your site.  There are free tools available out there to help you make sure that you know these answers.  For example, if you are a dog trainer in your town of Springfield, and you have used the word "amazing" many times in your content, it would be interesting to see that according to a search engine, you want the word "amazing" to be one of the main things your site talks about.  That might not be the result you are looking for!

Time

Probably one of the most important things about SEO is to realize that it takes time.  You can't make a change today and expect that you will be in the search engines tomorrow.

Links

Links are important!  If you can get others to link to your site, then your site gets "seen" by more search engines.  This makes you look more reputable and important!

Error validation

Even though you see a "pretty website" when you look, you should understand that behind the scenes it a lot of code!  Your website "behind the scenes" should be error free when someone comes looking!

You can see that it is not a simple science.  It is important, and make sure that you talk about it with your web designer!