SEO: What is it, What Does it do, and Should You Care?

By: Pete Francisco, Director of Web Development

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Do you know what it is?
Do you know what it does?
Should you care?

All great questions. Well, what is it?  Wikipedia defines SEO as  “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.”

Um, ok. Well, what does that mean?

It means that any time you sit down at your computer and try to find something: a company, a business, or a service, what comes up? When you decide you need new skis and you try to find the best price, you sit down and Bing it…. just kidding, nobody does that. 


Seriously though, when you Google something, where does it show up in the Search engines results? Is it on the first page, the second page, or way down on maybe the 15th page? “So what?” you say. Well, when was the last time you went past the first or second page of results before finding what you wanted, or tried a new series of words in the search bar? It probably doesn’t happen very often. People don’t want to spend their time sifting through pages of results. Google and Bing, or any search engine for that matter, know this and that is why there are ways to help get your site noticed on the Internet. There are many ways to do this.  One important way to get noticed is content.  The content you put on your site directly affects how your site is found by search engines. Well written content can greatly improve your visibility and help improve your ranking within a search engine’s return page. Another is by using specific terms related to subject called keywords. Search Engines use “crawlers” to analyze individual pages and index them according to the keywords that show up and that are strategically placed in important sections.  

Should you care?

Well, you probably don’t care really, at least about the actual SEO part. You probably fell asleep during that last paragraph. But you probably do care about your business, and ultimately that is why you should care about SEO.  You want to see your business listed on that first or second page of search results. You want people to find your shop, your business, your awesome collection of pet rocks that are so much better than everyone else’s. You want more people to your site. More people results in more online purchases or foot traffic to your store. More business means more profit. More profit allows you to continue doing what you love.  Which allows you to spend your time carefully crafting furniture or building the perfect bike and not worrying about SEO, or Google, or whoever uses Bing…..