What does SEO mean?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a fancy word for ways you can make your website easier for search engines (Google) to find.

Google is a software program that has a bucket full of the world's websites. When someone searches for something like "Chocolate chip cookie recipe" Google looks in its bucket of websites and finds all the sites that have those words in it.

There are millions of sites that have those words, so Google has a way of ranking them in a numerical order.

These ways can be learned and then used on your website to help Google put your chocolate chip cookie recipe before some other website.

Simply put, place the keywords "Chocolate chip cookie recipe" in the actual name of the page,  the page's title tag, the page's description (called a meta tag), the HTML heading tags (H1 and H2), in the beautiful and inviting image alt tag of a chocolate chip cookie you have on your page, and as bold and italic text in the body of the recipe one time.

You're probably thinking, that doesn't sound right, it doesn't make sense, how can you repeat that phrase so many times on the page and not sound like a Dodo?

It's not easy, but with some creative copywriting it can be done and done right - without abusing the system. The key is to use the keywords smartly and in a relevant manner. The page's title tag could be "Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe | Homemade | Organic". The meta description could be "Follow these steps to make the homemade chocolate chip cookies your Mom would be proud of." The page's H1 tag could be "The best chocolate chip recipe in the world according to my 6 year old".

I'm sure somewhere in the recipe instructions or details you can fit in the phrase "chocolate chip cookie recipe" in bold and once in italics.

That's the basics in a crash course, but not the whole story to SEO. Now that you've created this amazing piece of cookie content you need to optimize it with backlinks. Backlinks are links pointing to your recipe from other sites.

This tells Google's program that hey, other sites are making these cookies so the recipe must be good. I better share this recipe with people who ask my bucket for how to make a chocolate chip cookie.

I'm over simplifying this process but from a helicopter view that's what goes on. There's more complicated things related to SEO but if you can master the basics plus link building and do it over and over again with other pieces of content you'll be doing good.

If you have any questions or want to know more leave a comment. If you don't like my making Google out to be a giant bucket let me know.