I first discovered Search Engine Optimization the day I took over the company website. At the time I was working for a nonprofit, way before I started my own company. We were using a content management system at the time and I discovered that search engine spiders (yes, another term worth learning) couldn't even read our website! Not because it was an unattractive site, or because the content was confusing... in fact, it was a really top notch site with excellent graphics and content.
So what was the problem?
As wikipedia says, Search Engine Optimization 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."
Think of it this way: if the code (HTML for example) of your website is too messy and tangled for the search engine spiders to get through it, it is going to come back as a huge jumbled mess. The content management system was too dirty! It created bad code.
So after 5 years of learning how to code, structure, research and write key word content and properly index a website, I finally feel like I have a handle on it.
Its actually pretty easy to use SEO to elevate your website in search engines, based on key words. That is my definition of SEO: "Making your website findable on search engines."
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