Everyone wants that number one position in Google, and many companies will go to alarming monetary lengths to obtain it. Many website administrators see SEO, acronym of Search Engine Optimisation, as a wild and difficult beast, unsure how to approach it let alone begin to tame it. There's a preconception (and I would go as far to say, misconception) in the www that unless you throw money at SEO, you won't climb the ladder and you won't be found by your customers. And if this is true, how can the everyday small business compete online on an SEO front with your monumental, Fortune-500 type businesses out there?

It Isn't Easy

That's why there are a ton of SEO experts out there who will look after the many facets of optimisation front for you. They're very good at what they do, and they will spend all day tweaking and honing your site to increase its rank. We at (zero)seven highly recommend Reload Media if you're after a dedicated SEO solution.

Meta is Not Better

Other website administrators still living in 1999 believe that if they shove a ton of keywords into their meta keyword tag they will rank higher, when in fact Google Does Not Use The Keyword Meta Tag (source - Official Google Webmaster Central Blog).

Particular point of note from the above linked article:

"About a decade ago …  keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag."

However, there are many every day, legitimate ways you can refine your site for search engines, even before you hand it to an SEO expert. One of those ways is to spend a bit of time on your page content, thinking as a customer or user might.

Content Is Key

The text that appears on your website, the 'copy', is important for many reasons. It needs to be engaging, concise, and sell your product/service to any user who reads it. But what if those people who want - or need - your company, can't find it in the first place? This is why Search Engine Optimisation is so important.

Whenever you are writing, or directing someone to write your content, you need to stop and put on your customer hat.

"What would I be google searching to find this page?"

Chances are, if you'd search for it, a vast majority of your customers would think of and search for the same word or phrase.

So, target that word or phrase, on that particular page - for this is an exercise that you should be doing on each and every page on your website, and every page should have a slightly different target word or phrase.

Help your customers find what they're looking for and refine your content, to contain words or phrases of importance, in the context of the page you are optimising. It needs to sound natural when read aloud, and makes as plain as day what you are wanting the customer to take away from reading that page.  You help everyone by doing this; the customer gets what they need to, and the search engine can more easily direct the customer to you in the first place.

SEO is not quite as scary a monster as it first seems when you start to look at the what motivates it. And everyone who works on a website can help to tame it.