First lets take a look at why we even care about search engine optimization. Search Engine Optimization is one component of website marketing. What is the main goal of e-Commerce? Most of us would say to generate income from our website(s). We offer a product or service in exchange for customer payments.

So, how do we generate income from our website? First, we need to get customers to come to our website, then we need to convince them to buy the product or service we are offering. How do we get them to our website? We can use conventional marketing methods. These include advertising, word of mouth, customer referrals, newsletters, catalogs, etc. The nature of even conventional marketing methods changes somewhat in the world of Internet marketing. Customers learn about our product, or website, and can visit it immediately. We have only a small window of time in to convince them we have something to offer that they are interested in before they move on to the next site.

So, back to Search Engine Optimization. What is Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of optimizing a website to drive the most customer traffic possible to the site. The idea is that the more people who view the site, the more of them will become your customers. This translates into more money earned or more objectives achieved, depending on the goals of your particular site.

So how do customers find a website? Well some of them find the site through links from other sites, advertising or from word of mouth, but many of them find a site through the use of a search engine. Think of the search engine as the Yellow Pages of the Internet age. Even if you have good word of mouth, or a decent advertising budget it makes since to consider search engines as a potential source for new customers.

Some of the more popular Internet search engines are Google, yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AOL, AskJeeves, Alta Vista, to name just a few. When a customer searches for one of your products or services, it is best that your site appear in the first 10 sites on the search results page. This is because if a customer finds what he/she is looking for on the first page of results, they may never even view the other results.

Google currently serves 65% of the search engine market.¹ and continues to grow. At this point in time they seem to be the trend setters in search engine functionality. Much of my analysis is going to center on how Google works. Many believe that if you can successfully master Google’s search engine, you will also achieve high rankings in all of the other search engines. Once you master Google’s requirements, you can begin to look at the other search engines and determine where you can fine tune your process if needed.

First, we need to look at page rank. Next we need to get some understanding of what people search on. These are called key words. Last, we need to make sure that the search engines can search all of your pages. This means making sure your site is designed to be search engine friendly, and that the search engines are indexing your site.

What is page rank? Page rank is used to determine your position on the page when your site is selected as matching a customer’s search criteria. Your actual position will be a combination of the relevance of the search match and page rank. Page rank is a numerical calculation assigned by Google to represent the strength of incoming page links to your site. Page rank is calculated by adding a percentage of the page rank from each site that links directly to your site. So the more links you have, and the higher the page rank of the linking sites the higher your page rank will be. Page rank is also affected by the number of visitors to your site, and the relevance of search words on your page.²

What are keywords? These are words or phrases that describe our product. Basically indexing terms we wish the search engines to use to define our site. We will get the largest number of customer’s to our site when we define keywords that match the keywords our customer’s type in their search engine searches. HTML (programming language of Internet pages) provides a META tag description to list relevant keywords. Most eCommerce site software, blogging software, and content management systems provide a field where we can list the keywords relevant to each product, service, or item on our website.

Search engines have algorithms that help prevent fraudulent sites from showing up at the top of keyword searches. One method they use to prevent this is to match the keywords as defined by the site, with the actual content of the site. For example, if a site lists a keyword of “blue jeans” and there is nothing in the content of the site that talks about blue jeans, than the search engine will minimize or even ignore those keywords. So the key to being good at keyword optimization is to select keywords that match what your potential customer’s type into their search engines, and then write creative content that uses those keywords.

The last component to search engine optimization is to ensure that all of your sites content gets searched by the search engines. This is done by optimizing your sites organizational structure using search engine readable URL’s, sitemaps, and the robots.txt file. Your sitemaps can then be submitted to Google, Yahoo and other search engines. This component is handled by the programming of your website.

So to summarize, Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to provide the best search engine results and to drive the largest number of customers to your site. Optimization includes increasing page rank, improving keyword results, optimizing the site for search engine access. In addition to SEO it is also important to evaluate the sites content for its ability to convert visiting customers into purchasing customers.

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