Break from sweet reverie: To explain SEO

This morning it occurred to me that upon late I have had an abundance of conversations with friends (and not-so-friends) about what it is that I do for a living. Rather, what I claim as a skill that I wouldn’t mind continuing to do for financial (to some degree) profit for the rest of my days. In order to explain the complexities of the industry I have chosen to include myself in, I will need to use a practical example.  Not so much as to simplify the intricacy of the term, but to help me to stay on topic…LOL! Please keep in mind that the title is misleading in that I am only explaining the very basic, first step of SEO.

Most of you know that as I jump up on a soapbox of almost any topic, I tend to spew ramblings of sense and nonsense making conversation with me a bit tricky to understand.  This is simply because my left and right brain are working overtime…at the same time. The creative and the logical combining in a very confusing and often irrationally-rational manner. However, most of you will also contest that at the end of said conversation, I do try to tie it all together in some coherent way.

So, SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. I view SEO as the process by which some technical and creative things done to the front end and back end of a website can allow search engines to not only find said site in the black hole of the internet, but can give value and ranks and placement in search results. Search results are those links with text that come up when you search for things on Google, or Yahoo, or MSN, or Bing, and the like. Google, Yahoo, MSN,  Bing … these are search engines.

SEO is a set of tasks, features and rules that make a website “Optimized” for search.

SEO is not to be confused with SEM or Search Engine Marketing, which has to do with paid ‘stuff’ and other marketing related tools.  SEO is essentially working with organic search…”organic search” … look it up, no time for explanation of that one just now… sorry! 

Proper SEO techniques can help level the playing field for small and medium sized businesses and allow them to compete in the marketplace against the largest global businesses. Good SEO can also help the global giants to tap in to the smaller, more localized markets they may be missing out on by being soooo friggin big.

So, in one case, good SEO can make you larger, and in the other, it can make you smaller and more attainable. Smaller is not a bad thing, let me remind all you who think that there is somewhere else to go after you’ve reached global status. What, you wanna go UNIVERSAL!?  Well, eventually, your SEO will be able to help you do that too! 

Now for my example:
I have a friend who lives in a very small town of 3500. He owns a small candle shop left to him by his grandmother. Very sweet…gushing with family traditions and recipes and the like. One day he decided he could benefit from having a website built so that he could reach people outside of the small community and begin to expand his business.  Now, being a small shop in a small town meant having a very small budget to work with. Not uncommon in the least. So, he searched the internet and found a company who could build him a site and get his business “out there,” for a monthly fee. A small and manageable fee, mind you. Very simple, very attainable and very common that small business start out on the web in this particular manner.

He signed up online, made his payment online and started using the online site builder, which is included in his website package for the small fee. (in order to keep your monthly fee low, you are left to your own devices to build your own site) About a month later, he had completed his new business website! Eureeka!  The orders should start pouring in any day now!  However, to his chagrin, no orders. None at all from his website. But, business was ok with referrals from current customers and he was actually getting phone orders from relatives or relatives of friends and such, so the website just sat there.  Out in the black hole of lost websites, like so many do, his site was not working, it was not “found” by anyone looking for his particular product.

Now, it is easy to think that “of course his site isn’t being found, he’s competing with other much larger websites…monster sites that sell candles and fragrances and family heirlooms.”  Tsk, Tsk.

When I met this man I asked about his website and to my surprise, he said he had one, but it didn’t do anything so he was considering not renewing his contract with the website company. I felt my stomach churn and dizzy a little, as I let that statement set in to my small, and colorful, left/right brain thinking. Please refer to the statement in bold above about my beliefs of what proper SEO can do for EVERYONE. As nails on a chalkboard, his words made me cringe.

I begged him to reconsider and set out to try to explain to him what SEO is and what it can do for his non-existent, small, quaint website. I believe, I believe…<clicking heels and returning to the solid ground with the rest of the non-believers – or unenlightened>

He gave me a business card with the web address on it and I left his shop on a mission. He had given me permission to look through the site and give feedback, which I was all too happy to do, as many of us are. (if for no other reason, than to shine the light on the idea that all websites can be found)

Well, when I looked at the site I found large images of his late and oh so sweet grandmother, who started making candles many, many years ago.  I found again, large images of the shop and its contents. I found text…some of which was a little confusing and incoherent. I found no links, broken links and even an image of a PayPal order button that didn’t do anything. I found no meta stuff. I found garbled and foreign HTML coding. I found a strange URL structure. I found many, many things that almost made me cry for him. So, I began a very long laundry list of simple tasks that could improve, nay BEGIN his actual web business/presence experience.

I made the call. I explained in my best and most non-technical of vocabulary what I wanted to do to his site and what the possible results might be. After a long pause, he said: “ok,… what?”

Eventually, I began work on his site. I will not go in to detail as to what specifically was done, as this musing is meant as an explanation of what SEO is and a little of what it does.

SEO is complex and fraught with crazy terms and algorithms and acronyms and yes, myths and untruths and slights of hand and evil stories of ‘black hats’ and ‘gray hats’ and all sorts of hats and other confusing stuff.

SEO, when done properly is also…see bold explanation above.

Breaking it down:
S – earch, search: when someone or something searches a ‘search engine’ to find a thing or topic.

E – ngine, engine: the search engine is the mechanism online which people or things use to ‘search’ in to find a thing or topic. (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, etc.)

O – ptimization, optimization: the means by which a specialist makes a website ‘search-able’ and ‘findable’ to said engines of search.

See, you can have a website, but if the search engines don’t know you are online, you will never come up in a search. See, it’s like this: I go on my computer to find ‘country made candles’ (in reference to my friends products above). I go to my Yahoo homepage, which is my search engine of preference, and is defaulted on my own computer. I then, in the search box I type in “country made candles.” I expect that the results of that search will give me a list of websites and business that I can go to, to purchase said items. My computer does its thing and viola!, I get a list of 10 or so results on one page and somewhere on that page I will get a number representing how many websites were actually found using the term “Country made candles” and that number will be large…like millions large. I’m sure we’ve all seen this number on a search result page (and think…damn, how can there be millions of sites that sell ‘country made candles?’). Now, I can choose to click on one of the first returned links on the first page, or I can chose to go to the next page of results. What do you think I do? What would you do? My guess is, you either click on a familiar link (like Amazon or Ebay or some familiar site that is recognizable to you, because those are the most popular in search results) or you click one of the links in that first page of results and don’t ever bother going to the next page of results. Like most, you want quick, easy and simple.

There are other links on search results pages which run across the top and down the right-hand side of the page. These are paid links and deal with SEM.  We will not discuss those links here, only the organic or middle of the page link results.

Now, my friends website, being so outta whack, will be like number 5 milllion of the results that are returned to me, if he is in the results at all. So, I set out to revamp the most critical elements of his site so that he could get indexed by the search engines. Being indexed is step one to being ‘findable’ on the internet. Being indexed means that you  essentially ‘exist’ online and are among the gazillion or so other sites out in cyberspce. It is a work in progress and good SEO does NOT happen overnight.

Ok, so how can his site be recognized or indexed by the search engines? Well, that’s really complicated but I will do my best to simplify:

All search engines need to be able to ‘see’ a website before it can acknowledge it. In order for this to happen, the creators of the World Wide Web and search engines came up with an ingenious way to do this: they created little “bots” or “spiders” or what I visualize as something out of a sci-fi movie, that crawl around all over the black hole of the internet  – cyberspace – if you will, and ‘find’ websites. In order for a website to be found by these bots, there must be certain elements present in the coding of the website, along with a few other key things.

SIDE STORY: An SEO Fairytale
One day a search engine spider was crawling around cyberspace looking for new and wondrous websites to index. We’ll call him Charlie. Charlie stumbled upon a new site that had never been indexed and knocked on the door to be let in.  “Let me in so I can crawl you and index you amongst the many other websites.”  “Oh, you will love it when you are indexed and can live among the indexed and ranked sites.” Charlie go no response. Charlie moved on to find other sites that would let him in. You see, it is Charlie’s job to locate, index, rank and other such things. He is programmed to do this several times each and every day…all over the black hole of lost sites along with re-evaluating found sites…looking for new data, new ‘input’ and new content to index, catalog and rank.

Now, think of Charlie as a health inspector for websites. He has a key that will unlock almost any site in order to enter it, evaluate it, collect data from it, and then report back to the search engine he works for. (each search engine has many of these “Charlie’s running around cyberspace)

The reason Charlie was not let in to the site he came upon, is simply because the code at the door was incorrect or non-existent. The door was essentially locked. It also could be that instead of code that Charlie recognized as an open door, he found something quite foreign such as an un-coded list of images or flashy things or dividers and boxy things that confused him and made his eyes hurt and scared him off. Despite the fact that there was a wealth of content and new and fun or weird stuff beyond the door, Charlie would never get to see it. Nor would a person searching for it.

It could also be that Charlie’s key did not fit the lock of the site he was trying to enter…essentially the door was built wrong. Or, the door opened just a little and Charlie couldn’t enter the site all the way due to junk piled up just inside the door, blocking his entrance.

If my friends country candle website had a clear, well-built door with a sign on the door saying “Country Made Candles, Please Come In” Charlie would have surely entered, which is the first step in being a for real website, and much like Pinocchio becoming a for-real boy…a little SEO magic is needed for that to happen.

Now, when Charlie finally finds a door to enter, he comes in with his clipboard and starts evaluating whats inside the website. If he finds well organized, clearly identifiable and relevant “stuff” he will index the site as a newcomer to the web and report this back to his engine. And let me tell you, Charlie is quite a hard-ass when it comes to evaluating sites. He has the power to index, give points for good things and take away points for bad things…he also has the power to report back to his engine if a site is doing illegal or gangsta-like stuff inside their site…and the engine will basically turn off your lights and kick you out of your neighborhood.

One instance of this is, say you’ve had a site indexed and you decide to grow pot in the garage…the very next time Charlie visits…POOOF! You are kicked out, gone forever, never to be seen again on the internet.

The upside to having Charlie visit your site on a regular basis is that you should be adding new and relevant information to your site to make it better. You should be taking notes from your bigger and better neighbors to see how to improve your own site and every time Charlie visits, he notes all changes and either adds points or takes them away, based on how well you are complying with the rules of the neighborhood.

Now, keep in mind, your site is going to be visited by several “Charlie’s” from all the search engines, and that all engines have a different set of rules or criteria that must be met in order to be an index-able and ranked site with that particular engine. That’s where a good, ethical and professional SEO can help you. From the smallest of sites to the largest of sites…they all need SEO.

THE END

The end? Are you serious…could it be that simple? Is it really that friggin complicated? Yes. And no. If your website is not properly coded, properly designed, heavily flooded with images and flashy things or contains elements that break the rules, you will not get the results that others get. Period.

When I began to know about websites, SEO didn’t yet exist. There were thousands of websites out there, yet they were not organized in any particular way, so you had to know the exact URL -or- website address in order to find the site you were looking for. Well, over time, and several millions of more websites, there needed to be a way to organize, index and and rank websites in order to give the searcher (that’s you) coherent and relevant results when you search for a thing or topic. Hence, SEO was born (I will not give even a hint of when this actually happened, so as to not give a clue as to how old I am…LOL! But for those who already know…go easy). And this has been my simple initial explanation of how that begins to work.

Keep in mind that this is just the minimal information I think one needs to begin to understand how this process begins to work. And it DOES work.

I do not know if I have the guts to do a part-two, but we’ll see.

Please feel free to ask questions send comments and the like. I’d love to know if this actually helped any of you have a better understanding of what I do.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Gwen

P.S. MY OPINION: No one can promise page 1 results in Google…EVER!  Using good SEO techniques can however, ensure that your audience gets the very best of your information in a fast and organized manner, above your competition. Good SEO techniques should be used to communicate clearly with your human market, not as an end-all, be-all set of rules for your website. It’s terrific to design a search engine friendly website, but your first and foremost priorities should be to provide a great web experience for your human audience. A proper balance of human and non-human techniques, based on your particular business and a little target market research, makes for a professional and successful website.