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Have you ever heard someone mention Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) and wondered what they are talking about? You’re not alone! Unless you have a website or work with web design, there probably isn’t a reason you would need to know.

For those interested in learning more about it, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to maximize the number and quality of the visitors. The ultimate goal is to get your business/website as one of the top two sites in a search, as the average person using Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, or any of the other search engines will not click on more than the top two links. Making your website SEO friendly goes a long way to maximize revenue on your website and help potential customers/readers find you. Because no one knows exactly how Google and other search engines determine their rankings, a lot of it is guess work done by SEO “experts”, whose full time job it is to help companies make their websites more findable by the search engines.

How do I make my site more SEO friendly? This can be done in a variety of ways, but all require adjusting the source code of your website. Typically, your best bet is to set up title, keyword, and description meta tags on your site. You’ll also want to set up a Sitemap.xml of your site, which serves as sort of a map for the search engines spiders to ensure they get all of your pages recorded. If you’re a Wordpress user, two plugins that I recommend are the SEO Title Tag plugin and the Sitemap plugin. Both are free and go a long way to improving your findability. The search engine spiders also take into account additional factors, including the number of incoming links to your site, outgoing links on your homepage, PageRank (for Google search), and how often you update your posts. Posts that are updated regularly typically will rank higher than posts that are written and never looked at again.

If you are uncomfortable making adjustments to your website’s source code, you will probably want to consult a web designer or SEO expert for assistance with making your website more findable.

Because the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, the world of SEO is constantly changing with it as webmasters try to keep their website findable. If you would like to learn more about SEO, I recommend subscribing to the following blogs:

There you can get additional tips and keep up with the latest theories on Search Engine Optimization.