SEO is an acronym meaning Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, it entails all efforts to move your site up on the major search engine results. Doing this is no easy task. Search engines actively work to counter SEO efforts, so that their search results are as natural and representative as they can be.

How does the small business owner improve his or her site rankings in the search engines without overdoing it and being penalized? There are a few simple steps you can take to get some decent search engine results. I’ll try to keep the geekspeak down to a minimum.

The first thing you want to do is make sure you have good meta tags for each of your web pages. If you open up the source for your web pages in a text editor, or web editor like Dreamweaver, you should see two tags up at the top which contain the phrases “meta description” and “meta keywords”. These two tags describe your site for the search engine spiders. In the description, put a short sentence or two describing your site. For the keywords, less is better than overdoing it, so shoot for around ten site-relevant keywords, separated by commas.

Once that is done, take a look at your site URL in the address bar of your browser. If it looks something like this, www.yoursite.com/1/xy/9-0/file.html, then you might want to rework your directory structure (or folder structure, depending on terminology). Putting site-relevant keywords in your URL will help with your search engine rankings. Especially if your addresses look like my cryptic example above.

Here’s what I’m talking about: www.yoursite.com/dogs/bulldog-article.html. If someone does a search for articles on bulldogs, you’ve got a much better chance of being seen with such a descriptive URL.

Next would be to make sure you have relevant search keywords contained in the text of your site. That means that you should use some plain text (styled as you like of course) to describe the contents of your site. Search engines like good copy, and they can only tell that an image is an image, so writing out your copy with text would be the way to go.

Something that will hurt you in your SEO efforts is irrelevant keywords, such as popular search terms that have nothing to do with the content of your site. In addition to that, don’t submit all of your site pages to the search eniges, especially using some automated software. Don’t worry, the search engines will find it. Submit your base URL (www.yoursite.com) to Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and then leave them alone.

I say leave them alone, but there’s really one more thing you should do. Sign up with Google to use their webmaster tools. Then, get a sitemap of your site, tell Google about all of it, and sit back and watch your rankings improve.

Something to keep in mind is that keeping your rankings up is a never-ending battle. Don’t sit back for too long. Someone is always going to be better than you, so don’t be surprised if some site jumps ahead of yours or dethrones you from the number one position, should you attain it. Just knock them off and get back up there.

The main thing to remember is that you need to create your site for the users, not for some lifeless search engine spider. Create a site that people like, and they will link to it, return often, and your rankings will rise.