This is not for the tech savvy.  This is written for the small business owner that wants someone to answer the question “What exactly is SEO?” without having to use a technical jargon translator to decipher the code.

After speaking with several business owners recently in the Atlanta area, I realized that a good bit of you really wanted to understand SEO and online marketing better, but didn’t know exactly where to begin.  This is my attempt to get you started down a path of learning, and if it helps even slightly shed a ray of sunlight on the cloudy subject that is SEO, then it was worth it.

SEO is a widely used abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization.  That’s as technical as we’re going to get today, so don’t worry.  What this means to you, the business owner, is that SEO is a way to get your website to show up when people are searching for products or services similar to what you offer.  Often they will even be searching for exactly what your business offers, but if your website isn’t properly optimized, you likely won’t be found.

Modern search engines have changed our culture.  (For more on this, read John Battelle’s “The Search”)  People use search engines for everything.  For example, let’s say you come home from work and you have a water leak in your basement.  (It has happened to me)  It’s far easier and much faster to google “Plumber Atlanta” than it is to pull out the phone book, find the yellow pages, flip to “P”, and sift through all the irrelevant other businesses that start with the letter “P”, finally find “plumber”, then…well you get the point.

Now most cell phones are even equipped with a full browser, or at the very least a basic search function.   It’s how we find everything, from the latest electronic gadgets, to the newest Coach purse design, to the plumber that is available 24/7.  The only caveat is, your site has to show up when someone searches for it.

That’s where SEO comes in.

Most people, when searching for something specific, typically won’t go beyond page 2 or 3 of their search results, so it’s important that your site ranks fairly well for your industry in your target market.  Ideally you’d like to be on page one, because that’s where the vast majority of clicks occur.  The organic search results here are highlighted. These are the first 3 results for the search term “shoes.”

SEO takes practice, and can take some time to get the results you want, especially if your business happens to be in a very competitive market.  It’s better to think of it as an on-going process in which you are constantly learning, testing, and tweaking.  There is, however, a good bit of bad information available on the subject, so you have to be careful about where your information comes from.  Search engines will penalize you for using less than noble practices.  It’s important to use the current best practices to make sure that the campaign will have the most impact, and also fall within the guidelines of preferred techniques for the major search engines.

Many business owners are finding that it’s far more beneficial to budget for making sure their websites are ranking well and getting good traffic than to budget for newspaper or magazine ads.  The ROI is simply much better for online marketing campaigns because of the sheer volume of people that use the web.  Think about how many searches are performed each and every day.  Now compare that with the number of people that have time to read the newspaper everyday.  Admittedly, I didn’t survey everyone for this article, but I can guarantee you that it’s not even close.

There is a plethora of different SEO techniques that can be used to improve your rankings and make your website easier to find.  Just like with any other aspect of business, some techniques are harder to master than others, but anything that you can learn and implement will be a step in the right direction.

I encourage you to take some time to read and learn as much as you can about SEO and online marketing in general, and how it can help your business grow.