In my day job I split my time between the marketing and web departments as I work to help spread the company message and produce online conversions. I am part photographer, part graphic artist, and part web designer.

One of my main tasks on the web side of things, aside from general site maintenance, is to implement various strategies for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes. With that experience, I felt as though you all could benefit from some tips and tricks that will help raise your own rankings and drive some more traffic – and, hopefully, more customers – to your site or blog.

There is a lot to SEO and I think it’s best to break it up into a series of 4 posts to make it more easily digestible. Posts this week will include:

• What is SEO?
• Foundations – Quality Content, Keywords & Consistency
• Links – Internal & Inbound
• Analytics – Is it all working?

So today, we’ll hit the basics, What is SEO?

Like I mentioned above, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, essentially, the art of making your website/blog more accessible to search engines so they are able to have a better idea of where you should show up when users search for words and phrases relevant to what you are doing.

Search engines employ processes called “crawlers” or “spiders” or “bots” that examine websites and index their content based on what they deem to be the most important words and phrases shown on a given page. Most search engines, especially Google which is notorious for it, keep their processes close to the vest to keep anyone from taking too much advantage of the system. Because of that, we don’t have much control over what the crawlers will determine to be important. However, there are methods we can utilize (which we will discuss further in the coming days) that will help direct them to the content we want to rank well for, which will then help bring more visitors in.

There are companies out there that will claim they can get you up to #1 in Google (for a price) but, to be honest, with a little know-how, a little time, and a bit of effort you can move up in search results more organically and, at the same time, provide your visitors with a more content-rich experience that can only help bring in more sales.

Tomorrow, we’ll start off with some key elements to your overall SEO Strategy to help you hit the ground running.

Read More from Jason D. Moore Photography

• SEO for Bloggers: Foundations
• SEO for Bloggers: Analytics
• SEO for Bloggers: Links
• Society of Photobloggers
• Taking it to the Next Level