If you own or are con­sid­er­ing a web­site, you’ve prob­a­bly heard the terms Search Engine Opti­miza­tion or SEO about a thou­sand times. The term (so long as you know what the let­ters stand for) is self explana­tory. Opti­miz­ing your web­site for search engines sounds like a good idea, as most peo­ple still find what they’re look­ing for using a search engine. SEO is as much an art as it is a sci­ence, and the experts are usu­ally not that far above the folks who do com­mon sense things as far as results. This makes it con­fus­ing, and more than a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing to new folks in the web realm. Before you pay the pos­si­ble $50,000 to an SEO pro, let’s talk about how to make sense of it, shall we? Here are four sim­ple rules (or suggestions).

SEO isn’t as con­fus­ing as you might think

Rule 1: Search engines read text. If your site has no text, search engines don’t know how to find you. Exam­ples? OK, any site done entirely in Flash is an exam­ple of a dif­fi­cult to opti­mise site (notice I didn’t say impos­si­ble). Flash, while pretty and cool look­ing when done prop­erly, is prac­ti­cally use­less when it comes to search engines. I’m not say­ing not to use flash, I’m say­ing to use it spar­ingly. More on that in another post.

There is also a seg­ment of web artists who try to be all things to their clients, yet lack the skill set of writ­ing CSS. They tend to leave but­tons as images and / or embed text in images. This is fine if you do it prop­erly but if you do it wrong, no search engine traf­fic. It’s far bet­ter to use style sheets and text in every place you can.

Rule 2: Search engines have cus­tomers too. Odds are, you have a web­site as an exten­sion of your busi­ness. If so, you have cus­tomers (or want some). As a busi­ness, you pro­vide your cus­tomers what they want. If you didn’t, they wouldn’t stay cus­tomers for long. Search engines are the same. Searchers come to them to find the page most rel­e­vant their search. If engines sent searchers to pages that had noth­ing to do with their search, you guessed it… The searcher wouldn’t come back to that engine.

How does this infor­ma­tion help or hurt you? Well, Google, for instance, puts a lot of time and energy into mak­ing sure the results to searches are accu­rate and rel­e­vant. This means that they find all the ways peo­ple cheat the sys­tem and make their search engine ignore those peo­ple (or actively shun them). That way, the searcher finds his 18th cen­tury Amish swimwear and not a site about how to make a bil­lion dol­lars in ten min­utes on the Inter­net. Make your con­tent match your audi­ence (after a few weeks, this post might rank for Amish swimwear).

Rule 3: Get your link out there. Every blog post you read, com­ment on it (includ­ing this one). Every forum you visit, leave a com­ment (con­struc­tive). In the com­ments sec­tion of most blogs and forums, there is either a slot to type your web­site, or a sig­na­ture block in which you can type your address. Put your web address in your e-mail sig­na­ture, on your busi­ness card, carve it into a tree… Just get it out there. What does this have to do with SEO? Search engines count the num­ber of links back to your site. More = good, and your rank goes up the more you post. Enough said.

Rule 4: Don’t stress about SEO. Take a more Taoist approach to it. If you want more organic search traf­fic, write more about your top­ics of inter­est. Noth­ing is more rel­e­vant to search engines than a well writ­ten arti­cle on the sub­ject a searcher is look­ing for. What this means is, if your web­site does not have a blog, you’re wrong. Blogs are the best way to get free traf­fic, and I’d go so far as to say build­ing your site on a blog engine is one of the smartest things you could do. Word­Press han­dles 90% of the SEO stuff for you, so why not take advantage?

This is a cur­sory overview of what I do for SEO, and I get a lot of first page Google results for very lit­tle time invest­ment. I do it as a part of all the sites I design, and on what­ever CMS my client uses. What do you do? I’d love to hear about it (even if you think I’m an idiot, and I’m doing it wrong). If you have any­thing to add, feel free to do so in the com­ment block below.