SEO is great. By putting it to work, you get free traffic from the search engines. And not only is it free–it is pre-qualified, since it found you by entering one of your chosen keywords into a search engine. You don’t pay for it; it’s not an ad. You just make sure that your site appears within the first few search engine results for particular keywords.

But if I type “electrician” into Google, I get over 10 million results. Now, a lot of the results have some interest to me; Google is smart enough to guess where I am, and it favors local results.

So I type “electrician mountain view ca,” and now I get only about 43,500–and virtually all of them are of interest to me. Especially the first page, which starts with a little map, showing me a bunch of electricians in Mountain View, where I live.

If you are a Mountain View electrician, you probably don’t want to invest in optimizing your website for “electrician” on a national basis. You probably don’t care if anyone outside of a few towns in the South Bay area of Northern California knows you exist. But if someone in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, or Cupertino types in “electrician” and the name of their town, you’d really like to pop up as number 1–or at least, on the first page of Google’s search results.

Now, this is not a trivial subject (see this link for a more complete treatment). But it’s important that if you are seeking local business, you do NOT simply follow general SEO guidelines. If you are someone who provides services locally, you need to find out how to get ranked locally. That’s a far better use of your time and/or money. (I offer local SEO services, regardless of your locale; write to me for a quote. Tell me a bit about your business, your location, and where you are seeking customers.)

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“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization.” When you or anyone wants to buy something online, you put some words into a search engine–probably Google–and see what comes up. If you don’t find what you want on the first page of results, you think of some different words and try again.

So if you SELLING something online, you need to know what words and phrases people type into the search engine when they are looking for what YOU are selling.

SEO is about learning what those words are (that’s the part called “keyword research”), then doing what is required to make sure YOUR site shows up in the top spots in the search results. That’s what results in getting you FREE traffic; you don’t pay for ads, the customers come to you through “organic” search results.

There is a lot to SEO, and there is no “magic bullet”–no one thing that will give you your desired results. I’ve been studying the subject for quite a while, and I still feel very much like a student of the process. (For one thing, the search engine companies–especially Google–keep changing the rules. It’s not easy to keep up.)

I want to share lessons I’ve learned with you, and useful tools and books. Sign up for the email or RSS feed, above. Or just come visit here from time to time.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

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