There are a lot of companies and professionals out there who aren't going to like me for writing this. Because I am going to explain to you why you probably don't need them!

Search Engine Optimization is such a big thing that it goes by an anacronym most of the time. SEO experts tell you how to tweak this, and rate that, and research and study. They bandy about terms like "keyword density", "meta tags", "keyword relevance", "search engine ranking", like it ought to be obvious to everyone why these things matter to anyone. Remember, it is in their best interest to make it sound complex and necessary, when it is not actually either of those!

Search Engine Optimization really just refers to making your site easy to understand by computers. Search engines look at your page differently from how people do, so they will see something different than what you do. The pros want you to think that there are deep dark secrets known only to the lofty few, one of whom you must hire in order to succeed in your business. They make dire predictions of utter failure if you do not listen to their plea for a contract.

SEO services sell for $29.95 (flat fee) to $150 an hour. They range from outright scams on the cheap end, to highly professional services aimed at larger corporations. So who you gonna trust?

First, I'll cover services, then I'll cover what you should do instead of hiring someone, or what you should hire someone to do.

Don't bother buying a book on the subject. What you cannot learn on this page is either unethical enough to hurt your site, or unnecessary for a small business. Most books floating around online are scams, or too technical for the average site owner to understand.

The low end of SEO services will just put metatags into your site. While these can help a little, the truth is that they are no magic solution to anything. A good site without metatags will do better than a bad one with, any day!

The next level up will put in meta tags, and alt tags, and make sure your site uses common terms in the descriptions on it. This is still something you can do yourself, or do without (you need to do the second part, but you can do it yourself).

The more expensive companies that specialize in the field are targeting big business. Their clients are in highly competitive arenas, with big marketing budgets. They analyze EVERYTHING, and sift it through a fine sieve. It is important that you understand that this will not help a small business compete against big ones that are already established. It will not rocket you from page 10 to page 1. In fact, you could spend a LOT of money on the kinds of things the pros do, and never notice any kind of difference. There is a concept at work here, and it applies to many aspects of business:

It is the concept of the point of diminishing returns. It works like this:

There are a set of things you can do, that are very simple, that will make a HUGE difference in your returns. They cost very little, and the effects are immediately noticeable.

There are also very simple things that you can do that won't make a LOT of difference, but you do them because they are cheap or easy to do and will pay off in the long term.

There is another set of things you can do that will cost you a fair amount, but you will see some return from it. There is a pretty big trade off here, but probably still worth it to those who can afford it.

The fourth set of things you can do is made up of highly technical tasks that cost a lot of time or money to do. And the returns are very small, or even nonexistant for a small company. It is only worth doing for a company that has the resources to do it, and for which the returns will affect a huge number of departments. When Wal-Mart loses $10,000,000 a year in tiny little trickle losses, they can afford to spend $5,000,000 to stop the hole. When you lose only $100 a year from similar trickles, it is not worth it for you to spend $5000 to stop it. Your point of diminishing returns is lower than theirs, and your cost per dollar of return is much higher because there is less company to absorb it. This same concept applies to other business aspects as well.

So, with search engine optimization, listen to a small business expert, not a corporate guru, for accurate information!

The truth for small businesses is that they can do everything they need to have done themselves, or they can hire it very cheaply, from someone who just builds websites, or does proofreading. Really!

And here is what you DO need to do:

1. Create a site with good text content. This is the NUMBER ONE search engine strategy. Without good text, no matter what else you do, your site will fail.

Search engines see text. They do not see images. If you create a site with a huge graphic on the home page, no meta tags, and no text, and just an image that says "click here", the search engine will have no way of knowing what your page is about! An image with text on it is NOT text. The search engine can only read text that was typed in directly on the page (or pasted in, etc). So make sure you have text on the page that tells what the page is there for, most importantly on your home page, but try to do that with all your pages, because the search engine will index them all, and you don't know which one it will decide to show. Meta Tags are NOT a substitute for good text... a site with both will do best, but if you have to do without one, don't leave out the text!

What NOT to do: Do not use "hidden text". Make the text part of the page, or the search engine will be able to tell that it is hidden, and you can be penalized for that.

2. Use keywords in your text. Keywords are words that people think of to look for your site. When I say use them, I mean, if your site has a topic that people may refer to with several different sets of terms, then you need to use each one on the page in some way. For example, this page can use the terms "search engine optimization", "seo", "online marketing", "website promotion", or other common terms that someone might look for it under, but I don't have to try hard to use them, they just come with the writing. A well written page will naturally use common terms anyway, so don't obsess about it. Just explain well, and it will be good enough!

What NOT to do: Do not pack the page with keywords! Do not misuse them in an unnatural way. Search engines also have rules about how people use language naturally, and you can get penalized if you repeat something in an excessive manner. Do not use words that have nothing to do with your site either. It won't help you with the search engines, and worse, it won't get you customers to your site who are interested in what you really have. Just write well, and you won't have to worry about it much!

3. Use Alt Tags for images with words in them. Look this up in a book on HTML, or look up in your HTML editor program, since there is usually a simple way to put in an alt tag. An Alt tag is a specially coded bit of text that tells the browser to show that text if the image is not displayed. The image may not display if it is damaged, missing, fails to load completely, or if the person looking at the page has images disabled. Alt tags can also help people with visual impairment to navigate a site better. A good alt tag will provide a concise description of the image, or the text on the image. If your logo has text on an image, then just write what the text says. Alt tags are also not a miracle fix, they are simply an easy thing to do to fine tune your site.

What NOT to do: Do not use Alt tags that are too long. And Alt tags are not important on images that do not have text on them, as far as search engines are concerned.

4. Put in Meta Tags. Meta Tags are bits of code that are seen by the search engine and browser, but not by the site viewer. They can do a lot of things, but the two that we are concerned about are the Description and Keywords tags. A good site description will be informative, but not too long. It will describe key features using keywords. The keyword tag will contain words that tell the search engine what your site is about. Remember, keywords are the words that other people would think of to find your site, so use a good variety.

A search engine looks for text in your site. It also looks at metatags. If there are no metatags, it uses part of the text in your site for the description - this can have unpredictable results! But even if you DO have metatags, some search engines quote parts of the text. Google does this. It looks at the text in the page and if it finds a match there, it will still return the result. And search engines will not pay much attention to keywords if they do not correlate with the site content.

If your site has good text content, Metatags will give you almost no advantage. A few search engines still use them first, but the biggies to not rely on them heavily because so many scammers have misused them. Yes, you should put them in for the few times they do matter - because they are quick or cheap to do, and they can make a difference sometimes. But don't worry about hiring a pro to analyze them, it won't be worth it.

What NOT to do: Do not use keywords that are not in your site. Keep your description to the point and do not be misleading with it. Do not use a metatag generator that creates 10 different kinds of metatags - some of those will introduce errors into your site. Just worry about the Description and Keywords.

5. Use a title. This is also code behind the scenes that does not show in the page - it is the page title that shows in the top of the window of the browser. A shortcut for a site is to use a general title for the whole site. Many low budget sites do this because it is simply faster. But a page title that reflects the actual page contents can be helpful. At the very least, you want one that names your site or business, and is the same on every page.

What NOT to do: Do not leave the title as "untitled". That helps no one. And do not name the page inaccurately, or use a title that is more than a few words or a short phrase. There is no point giving your page a title that is three sentences long, there is no room to display it at the top of the page, or in the search engine listings.

6. Get inbound links. Inbound links are links on other people's sites that lead back to your site. Many search engines now keep track of how many other people think your site is worth linking to, and they consider that in how they rank your site. So exchange links, post to directories, and ask everyone you know to put a link on their site for you.

What NOT to do: Do not create seven other sites and link your site in to them in the hopes of fooling the search engines into thinking your site is big. It won't work, because the age of the site also matters. Since I have an established site, anything I link into it in the same domain will get indexed very quickly. But if I establish another site, it is still going to have to gain importance in its own right. Linking it into my existing sites helps, but that won't propel it to instant fame either. Be careful what kind of traffic exchanges you participate in, some do not help rank or sales either one - who cares if you get tons of traffic if it does not help you sell anything? And watch out for popups... if your site has to have popups to get traffic, or your site appears on popups, you'll annoy your guests. When I talk about inbound links, that kind of traffic "generator" is not what I mean. I mean permanent links on other people's reputable sites. Each inbound link is a drop in a bucket. You need to aggressively pursue legitimate links, and not get sidetracked by hype.