First, a note. Kirk and I switched days this week. You can find his weekly Wednesday blog here.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is more art than science. People optimize their sites in an attempt to get higher up on a search engine results page, the page you get when you type in your question to Google or Yahoo. The higher up you are, the more likely it is that you will get traffic to your site.

SEO is a balance of getting high traffic that then results in some action on your site. At TatStore.com we have optimized the artist directory for such terms as “artist directory” in the hopes that the people looking for an artist will be interested in finding our list of tat artists.

But if you type in the term “artist directory” into Google, the search engine returns over 6,800,000 pages of results. So how do you attract people to your site when your result may be half way down the list? That is where SEO comes to play.

First, consider the keywords you use. If your keywords in your title tag (see my post here for an explanation of a title tag) are too general, such as “tat artist”, you will be competing with hundreds of thousands of other sites and you will probably be found half way down the list. If you use a specific keyword phrase, such as “tat artist San Francisco” you will be competing against less sites and have a better chance of showing up higher in the search results.

Secondly, using simple analytics, you can determine which of these keywords is resulting in people coming to your site and taking the action that you want, such as filling out that form you have to get a quote for work. More on analytics in another post.

As a small business owner, you may wonder if this is all worth the effort. After all, you do not make money doing this. You make money running your business. But you put effort into your store or logo or web site. The same effort into SEO can pay off well for you, too.