SEO in action

Search engines don't always know which web sites will have the information the searcher is looking for. Often they need help to know what a web site is about. That's why it's important to pay attention to the code and text on your site, so you don't end up in search engine oblivion. If your web site is invisible to search engines, it might as well not exist. Here's a good anecdote about the power of search engine optimization, or SEO. You would think that a search for "ThinStick" should turn up ThinStick.com, right? Well up until a few weeks ago, ThinStick.com was still stuck in the middle of page two on Google search. Now, it's the first result thanks to help from the web site's developer. The main problem with the web site was that the home page lacked text for the search engine spiders to read. By adding some more written content, plus writing text descriptions of the images into the code, Google was able to figure out what the web page was about. We also added links to ThinStick.com on a few other web sites to help with placement. The next step is to edit the pages "meta tags" -- the code that controls what appears in the title bar at the top of your browser. This is actually the most important place on your web site to put code. Now if you search for "ThinStick," these are the top results on page one: 1. ThinStick.com 2. athinday.blogspot.com (ThinStick official blog) 3. ThinStick on Facebook 4. ThinStick on Twitter 5. ThinStick in the Metabolic Maintenance (parent company) store 6. ThinStick on the Campbell Consulting blog

-Adrianne (@msfener)