Meeting with Problems

I was sitting in on a meeting at work this morning, and the boss was speaking with an SEO specialist about the big redesign of our website which we will soon undertake. Anyway, SEO was all they ever said, but they said it a lot. I nodded my head enough to seem like I knew what they were talking about, and I kept up with the rest of the discussion, but that acronym remained elusive until now:

from Wikipedia

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevancy, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engines and also appeals to human visitors.

The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Additionally, I also found out about so called White Hat and Black Hat SEO, which means what you would assume. White hat is the good guys; playing by the rules and designing content for users and not resorting to deceptive tactics to improve their spot on the search engines. Black Hat is appropriately dark and deceptive, often using hidden text, and repeated word to lock in results and generate hits. Invent anything and people will exploit it. Trust me on this one.

And that's it. I'm going to be taking some training in it in the weeks to come, so I'll get more than my fair share of knowledge about it. But at least now I'll know what they're talking about. Just making sure your site is optimized as much as possible for web searching and trawling.