The internet is not much different than using the Yellow Pages to reach out to your customers. Your potential customers are already online and are actively seeking your product or service. In many cases they’re also ready to buy. So your job becomes attracting these customers to your website rather than your competitors. So how exactly is this done online? In the yellow pages you could have purchased a bigger ad, or maybe you could purchase the more expensive four-color ad. Or maybe you changed your business name to AAA Plumbing to ensure that it was listed first in directory of plumbers. Interestingly enough, the process isn’t too much different online.
Your goal online is to get your website to index as high as possible within the search results for a given set of search terms. This process starts by making your website search engine-friendly, or generally more easily read and processed by the search engines. To improve your ranking you must first understand that the search engines find out about your website through the use of Spiders. These computer programs got the name “Spiders” because they crawl though the worldwide web reporting what they find back to the search engines, who in turn catalog the information and store it in their massive databases. These spiders travel to a website, read everything on a page, then follow the links on that page to other pages and start the process all over again.
So the first step in improving your search rankings is to make your website easy to read for these spiders. This process is called SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization. Additionally, since these spiders are really nothing more than computer programs tasked with crawling through the internet, you need to also help them understand “what” they’re reading. This is an important point, because spiders aren’t intelligent, meaning, they can’t tell that one website that uses the word “football” is talking about the NFL, while another website might be talking about “soccer”. You need to help them understand the meaning and context of your website as well as make it easy for them to read. This helps them “understand” what your website is for, and as a result will help them better insert your website into relevant searches by your customers.