A young man approaches you for advice, distressed because he’s in love with a girl and he can’t get her attention.

You ask him if he’s ever spoken to her. “Gawd, no. She doesn’t even know I exist.”

You ask how he knows that. “Because we have no common friends, no common interests and she lives in another city.”

You ask him if he has tried to get him to notice her. “No, I don’t know how to do that.”

What would your advice be? To keep doing what he’s doing and hope for the best?

I’m betting not. (Unless you’re really bad with women.) I’m guessing you would suggest that this young man try to show up somewhere that this girl will be -a hockey game, a shopping mall, etc. In other words, he has to put himself in a situation where this girl will find him when she is most likely looking for a fella.

And this is the purpose of search engine optimization.

When you optimize your site for a targeted list of keyword phrases, you’re putting your site where your customers are looking for you. If you have a site thrown up there with no thoughts of how people will find it…you’re that young man in a different city than the object of his affection doing nothing and wishing for her to find him.

Let me explain how this works in search.

When you type a phrase into the Google search bar, in the seconds it takes for a list of results to appear in front of you, Google has scoured the Internet for the pages most relevant to the phrase you’re looking for.

Google uses a top secret algorithm to determine what page is most relevant (it remains secret so it’s fair for everyone to try to get to the top of the results) but we do know certain things:

• One way Google determines a page’s relevancy is by checking to see if your keyword phrase is in the title tag and meta description of the page
• It’s also looking at whether or not your keyword is in your domain
• Keyword density of the content among your pages is being weighed

See, if someone has searched for “maple tree seedlings” then Google figures a website page that is titled “Maple Tree Seedlings” is pretty relevant. If that page also has the phrase “maple tree seedlings” sprinkled through the content then it’s likely even more relevant. If it has a meta description that says, “Maple tree seedlings are not a sturdy plant. Find tips for protecting maple tree seedlings” and a domain like mapletreeseedlings (dot) com it would be that much better.

There is more that goes into it but that’s a basic explanation that should show you why this SEO thing is pretty important. It will help your website get a position in the top ten results for a Google search and you really should care about that. Because if you don’t appear there then you don’t exist.

Next time I’ll help you determine what your keyword phrases should be.

Any questions? Fire away!

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My youngest child is a real handful. She’s 30 pounds of attitude, this one, and she doesn’t seem to like her father as much as she likes me. She has this thing when our family goes on a drive. Her car seat is on the driver’s side of the van and her older sister’s car seat is on the other side. My husband likes to drive when we go somewhere together and when he opens her door she throws a hissy fit because she wants Mommy to let her out.

So when we get out of the van, my husband walks around to my side to let out our five-year-old and I walk around to his side to let out the little monster. We’ve been doing this for a year now.

Last weekend we were doing a bit of traveling around and the little one starts shrieking because she’s sitting behind Daddy and she wants to sit behind a girl. The sound of the screaming is like knives going through your skull so I had the big idea to let the girls swap seats.

When we stopped to get out at our destination (post-car seat swap), I just opened the door on my side to let the diva out and Jason opened the door on his side to let our other child out.

No walking around the van like morons.

Sometimes a problem doesn’t seem like a problem until you find a solution.

How many website owners out there complain that they invested hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars into their web presence only to have no traffic? A lot.

If your website isn’t working for you, there are a gazillion things that could potentially be causing the problem but here’s the thing. If you’re not getting traffic, I’m willing to bet that nobody along the way has asked you about keywords. And that is a huge problem.

It doesn’t matter how pretty the site looks (unless you’re a big brand or already have a following and people know to search you by your brand name) or how many fancy bells and whistles you have on there (a.k.a flash animation, disco ball, talking heads, etc.) if you haven’t optimized your content with an eye towards SEO then you’re not going to be getting any drop in traffic.

Now, I’m not some self-proclaimed SEO hero/guru/aficionado. But I do know quite a bit about it and I am a website copywriter who applies it everyday.

I also know how to explain this stuff in simple language so that when people hear me talk about it, they start to understand why they should be optimizing their content. Some get panicky wondering why they hadn’t done it sooner.

So I’m going to finish this post here. I’ll be back later this week with a more extensive (yet basic) explanation of search and how to figure out what keywords you should use in your website content.

Do you have questions about optimizing your website content? Ask away and I’ll try to address them later in this series of posts.

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