Search Engine Optimization. There is a so called debate among professional marketers as to whether or not SEO is worth the HTML it's coded in. A friend of mine who is a professional web designer and makes a living at this swears that SEO is a total waste of time because the chances of reaching a page 3 position with your web site, depending on how much competition there is in your field, is slim to none. Why page 3 he says? Because it is believed that the majority of searchers will NOT go beyond the third page of a search. If they haven't found what they are looking for by then they're not going to and in most cases give up. Nobody has any patience when it comes to combing the search engines.

But what exactly IS SEO? Well, in it's simplest definition it is the process of making your web page search engine friendly so that when each search engine spiders your site, the more search engine friendly the site is, the higher up in the rankings you go, and closer to that coveted page 3 position.

So how exactly DO you go about SEO? Well, theres a number of things you can do. The main thing is you have to look at the content of your page or pages and most web sites are more than a single page, and actually that is where SEO begins. You want to make sure your site is laid out logically and professionally. A standard, well made web site has what is called a main or index page where people will come to first. This page should have some kind of a welcoming message and give the visitor an idea of what they will find at the site. On that page there should be a logical layout of navigation links. These are links to other pages in the site which should include a site map. This makes it easy for the search engines to go through your entire site. A typical sales site for say, "toys" when arriving at the main page will have a welcome to the company and on top of the page will have a number of links, each one pointing to maybe a different kind of toy, or categories. You would then click on the category you were interested in, say "games" and continue from there. Maybe the games page would then break games up into sub categories. Each site of course is going to be different but should be laid out in some logical order.

The design of the site is only the start of the SEO process. See, spiders (the tools search engines use to visit your site) are really blind to the "look" of the page. They need something with a little more technical substance. That something comes in the form of what web designers refer to as "Meta Tags." These tags are various ways to describe each page in the site. There are two Meta Tags that are extremely important.

The first one is the "keyword" tag. This tag is used to give the search engine spider a list of words that accurately defines what is found at the site for each particular page. So in the case of the toy example above, a page at the site that lists all "Board Games" would include the keyword "board games" in the keyword Meta Tag and any other keywords that would be pertinent to that particular page. This would be done for EVERY page on the site. Needless to say if you have a large site with many items on each page this could become a very time consuming process.

The second Meta Tag that is extremely important is the "Description" Meta Tag. Description is used to do just that, describe the page the spider happens to be on. For the toy example above the Description Meta Tag might read something like "All Board Games For Children Ages 5 and Up" or whatever is appropriate to describing the page. It is this description that you will see when doing a look up in the search engine directory for each site. Obviously the better descriptions are going to be the ones that will attract your eyes. That is why this is so important.

There is more to SEO than the above but those are the main things. Again, the battle rages as to just how important all this is in the grand scheme of things. One site my friend worked on for 2 years, optimized fully, and with countless thousands of dollars spent on search engine "bribery", as he calls it, and this site STILL can't be found on any search engine on the first 3 pages.

So the debate will of course go on. Those who swear by it and those who think it's a crock. You can make up your own mind about all this.