SEO stands for Special Equipment Operator? Senior Executive Officer? Sponsors for Educational Opportunity? Special Equipment Operator? State Engineers Office? Seasoned Equity Offering? Software Engineering Organization? Society of Education Officers? Special Equipment Option? Security Engineering Officer? Special Exemption Order? OK, OK let's get serious here. South Eastern Ohio? Sorry I'm done now. Actually all of these are actual acronyms for SEO but not the one we want to talk about here.

First a quick dictionary definition: "The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process."

Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a critical skill to learn if you want your Web site to rank well in free search engine listings. E-commerce sites are notoriously difficult to optimize for high rankings due to a number of factors that hinder their ability to rank well, including poor shopping cart designs, lack of content, poor linking structures, lack of inbound links, etc. This is the place to learn how to build or modify your Web site to achieve better rankings in the free listings Google?, MSN?, Yahoo! ? as well as in other popular search engines.

Content is one of the biggest influences on the success of your search Engine Optimization program. There is a saying that content is king and this is true whether it is for your optimized web pages, you're paid advertising message, or your optimized news releases. Search engine optimization is a lot like weight loss. The one big difference being that when you get SEO right it usually doesn't come back to haunt you after a few years. You've got some things that are effective and some that are not, and it's hard to trust the claims of one over the other. You want to believe the great-results-with-no-effort claims, and you hope they are true... but are they worth wasting your time and money on.

Search engine optimization is a lot like weight loss. The one big difference being that when you get SEO right it usually doesn't come back to haunt you after a few years. You've got some things that are effective and some that are not, and it's hard to trust the claims of one over the other. You want to believe the great-results-with-no-effort claims, and you hope they are true... but are they worth wasting your time and money on.

Did you know that most search engines can't "read" graphics? Did you also know that key search words and phrases in your "title tag", "META tags" (in the HTML script of your site) and body text are often very important references that search engines analyze when ranking web sites for search relevancy? Optimizing your title tags, Meta tags and your body text for search engines gives it a much better chance of ranking highly for particular words or phrases that you would expect potential visitors to type in to search engines to find your site.