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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