For any of you who may not be familiar with search engine optimization or SEO, it is the attempt to get high search-result rankings for a word or phrase on Google or Yahoo. If you're selling antique dolls on your website, for instance, and somebody types “dolls” or “antique dolls” into a search engine, then you'd like them to see a link to your site in the search results. Of course, the closer to the top of the first page of the results that link is the better. Many people may not bother looking for links beyond the first page or two of results. Considering that there may be hundreds or even thousands of websites selling the same product you're selling, getting good results in search engine rankings may be very difficult. What can a business or other organization do to get good search results?

One answer to that question is to put SEO on the back burner until you're ready. SEO is very serious business and can cost thousands of dollars. By all means don't spend that kind of money only to discover that there's little demand for your product or that you're not reaching your target market effectively and through the right channels. Researching your market is very important, and designing your website, logo, ads and other designs for your business or organization must effectively promote your business to that market. Sure, your SEO may bring a lot of visitors to your site, but visitors may click right out of it if they don't find what they want.

One way to solve this problem is to start small with inexpensive ads and other promotional graphics to test to see what works and what doesn't. You can check not only your sales volume but use your site statistics to see if more visitors arrive on your site and if they stay longer. Are there more visits to a product page that contains information about the product you're advertising? Are you seeing more comments about that product on your blog or your forum? If you're not seeing positive results, then try something else. Look before you leap and test to see how you can effectively promote your business before you invest a lot of money.

Once you make informed decisions about what designs seem to garner favorable reactions from your target market, you still may not be ready for investing in SEO. Getting back to the example of the business selling antique dolls, such a business might want certain words and phrases like “dolls,” “antique dolls,” and “antique toys” typed into search engines to bring up a link to their site. These words and phrases are known as “keywords” or “key phrases.” Which of these keywords and key phrases will generate traffic to your website? One way to find out is to use what's known as “pay per click” or “PPC.” When using PPC, you pay a search engine like Google to list your site on the search results in a “sponsored ad.” You bid on keywords, and the more you bid, the higher your link appears on the sponsored ad. Our hypothetical antique-doll business might bid more money than other sites and get the highest ranking on the list on Yahoo. As the name of PPC suggests, the doll business pays for each time a link to their site on the sponsored ad is clicked. Using this technique, the doll business discovers which keywords will bring visitors to their site to buy antique dolls.

Finally, the antique doll business is ready to invest in SEO. It now knows that it can bring customers to the site using various keywords, and more importantly, it can sell dolls to those customers assuming its research efforts have indicated that there is a market for antique dolls. It knows which keywords it can use on its website's copy, page titles, and HTML meta tags to make those web pages more likely to show up on search engines. When people arrive on the site, they'll see a design that makes them want to make that purchase. Make sure your own designs work for your own market before you invest in SEO.