Search Engine Optimization

If you've got a website, you've probably already heard about SEO. This is the next big thing that fledgling business owners have to care about if they want to be successful, or so the twenty-odd persistent sales pitches I've received would have me believe.

Just in case you haven't incorporated recently, or registered for a sales tax certificate or joined your Chamber of Commerce or rented office space, I'll explain SEO. Search Engine Optimization is basically doing things inside your web page's code that aren't visible to your visitors but ARE visible to the programs Google, Alta Vista and all the other search engines use to find your page and decide when to include in their search results.

As an example, I entered "consulting skills training" in Google just now. There are about 27,000,000 results for this search. Our site, www.consultingstance.com , does not appear on the first page. Shocking. Oh, wait. We haven't paid $1,500-$5,000 to an SEO consultant to optimize our website so that it will appear on the first page. In fact, it appears on page 6 (61-70 of about 27,000,000). If you're a casual visitor who is shopping for some training, the sites on page 6 aren't any more likely to attract your attention than the sites on page 106, right? We might as well not have a website at all. So we'll probably pay for SEO.

But here's my question: What happens when 60 other companies who sell consulting skills training also pay for SEO and we are back on page 6? What if they already did and our investment is wasted? How can we possibly expect to compete in a business where we have 26,999,999 competitors?

Seriously. I'm asking. The answer to that question would be worth $1,500 to me.