What exactly is SEO? How does it work? These are questions a lot of clients ask me. It’s often difficult to explain it in layman’s terms without baffling your customer and sounding like a real geek!

Yesterday I was meeting with a new customer that we have just built a mobile website for and she asked me how to get her main website onto the first page of Google. She told me that not one web designer had been able to explain this to her. I answered the best I could without turning into Bill Gates. I think I explained it pretty clearly and she seemed cool with my answer so I guess I either totally baffled her or she did in fact understand. She’s pretty savvy so I’m confident she grasped the basics. Afterwards I found a video by my buddy Damon Greene which gives a pretty good overview of what search engine optimization is and I sent her a link to it. You can watch it below.

The problem is many web designers have shrouded SEO in mystery. When in truth … it’s pretty simple. No disrespect to web designers but they are web designers after all. They are not SEO specialists. Optimizing a website so it ranks high in the different search engines is a job for an SEO specialist. This person or company knows two fundamental things:

1. How to optimize each page on the site so that it is capable of high rankings
2. How to build backlinks to your pages and thus create the impression (at least to Google/Yahoo/Bing etc) that your website is popular. These backlinks are like “votes”.

Your websites popularity for various keyword phrases tells Google that it must be what the searcher is looking for and thus ranks it higher than another site that may not have so many “popularity votes”.

That is a very brief outline because I don’t want to go further than the basics at this stage and I think Damon’s short video might help you understand it a bit better.

I hope that helps you understand SEO a bit better.