Put simply, SEO relates to building your website in such a way that search engines can properly index your website. It’s quite simple: there should be text on your website that is relevant to your company’s name and to the keywords or phrases that people will use to find the product or service that your business sells. That text should be present in 3 key places: the content on your website, the meta tags within your website’s HTML code, and the HTML itself.

Think about the last search that you made using Google or Yahoo Search. What did you search for? Let’s say you are in the market to buy a new house and need some help finding a great property in East Dallas. So, you search for “East Dallas Realtor”. If you look at the results for that search (go ahead, try it), the chances are that somewhere on the first page, you’ll find the website of Kay MacIntyre. And, if you click through to her website, you’ll find that her website has a lot of content that is relevant to your search phrase.

For example, you can see that the headline on the home page uses lots of relevant keyphrases:

And, you can see that the meta tag that generates the browser title uses the keywords “East Dallas Realtor”:

Of course, these are just a few of the dozens of reasons her site ranks well. Creating a search engine friendly website requires many extra steps, and certainly will increase the cost of any website project. But, if being “found” online is of important to you (if you’ve created a website in the first place, we’d like to assume it is), then you need to ensure that your website is built properly. This is a process we go through with every new customer, whether we are creating a website from scratch or taking over an existing site.

We encourage you to read future posts where we will dive deeper into “SEO” techniques and the affect they can have on your business.