What Is SEO and Why Do I Care?

SEO is yet another techie acronym to add to your arsenal. It stands for Search Engine Optimization and is all about optimizing your website’s position in search results. Many books have been written about SEO and websites are dedicated to it. It’s big business—and it should be.

Showing up higher in search results (like when you go to Google and type in a phrase or keyword) usually means more traffic and more business.

SEO is part science and part art. The SEO experts figure out what search engines look at when they rank websites. Then they figure out what can be tweaked to improve a site’s rank in the results. Some SEO tactics are of questionable value and others are borderline unethical, but the mainstream of SEO thought is simple, basic improvements that will boost your rank in search engine results.

It’s usually simple things like figuring out keywords for your site and then putting those keywords in the right places. Those right places include the title bar (the text that shows up at the top of your browser), any headers, headlines or bold text on a page, and the meta data (helpful information in a page’s code that’s not visible in a browser).

It’s really not rocket science. What search engines do is look at a page and try to figure out what’s the most important thing on that page. For a page to be the number one search result for something like rocket science it better have the words “rocket science” and other important keywords in key locations on the page. Otherwise it’s probably not really about rocket science.

Good SEO is about recognizing the same thing for your site. So if you’re in the rocket science business, you’d probably have keywords like rocket science, rockets, propulsion, physics, NASA, booster, missile, etc. And you’d want to use those words in your headlines and other important places on your site.

The Simple Skill That is an SEO Secret Weapon!

There is one key skill that is often overlooked in the quest for higher search engine rankings. Yet almost everyone who uses the web will at least have heard of it. Good Web Designers use it every day and real SEO experts use it too. So what is this skill? Lets see what the well known and respected SEO Expert Jim Westergren has to say about it. Recently he listed what he sees as the essential skills that any SEO expert or good Internet Marketeer needs to know. Top of that list was HTML:

“As an SEO, knowing HTML is a must. You need to see and understand how the search engines are reading the source code of the web pages.”

Its an excellent and often overlooked point – hence the little known secret! If you know HTML (which is easy to learn) you can really get under the skin of any web page and start to see how the search engine reads the page. So it seems that a little time spent brushing up on your html skills will be time well spent.

You can use your updated or new knowledge of html to design or alter your pages so that the search engines can read through them easier. If you stop to think about it for a moment you will see that this makes perfect sense. I mean who likes a hard read! I remember having to study Dicken’s classic book “Hard Times” during my school days and boy that was a hard read. It wasen’t just the subject matter but also the tiny font and the immense word density of the pages.

In order to put this key skill into practice you don’t have to be a profesional code wrangler but you must at least know how a web page is structured, what the main tags are, and how they effect the readability of the page. With this knowledge you can take your current SEO skills to the next level and fine tune your pages for even more exposure.

So the Secret SEO Weapon is not so secret afterall. Yet my guess is that many internet marketeers and many self proclaimed SEO experts have probably overlooked this simple and yet essential skill. So be good to your search engine robot friends amd make it easy for them to read your pages. I am sure they will thank you for it by promoting your pages up the search engine rankings.