If you ask the majority of people outside to the internet industry what SEO is most of them would say it’s getting your site ranking no. 1 on Google. Well that’s the hoped for outcome of most SEO practices but there is much more to it than that.

The first step of any SEO strategy has to be to determine who is your target market and what do they want from your website. Until you know who you’re dealing with and what they want you can’t possibly be in a position to provide it to them and you can’t know what terms and phrases they’ll use to find a website.

Without know what keywords or search phrases to focus on you can’t begin to optimize your website. Once you’ve found this information then you can take some steps to help your site rank highly in the search engines. Some of these activities will be “on-page”, i.e. things on your actual website pages, and some will be “off-page” such as getting sites to link to yours. These activities collectively are known as search engine optimization (SEO).

A third element of an SEO campaign and one that is often forgotten by small business site owners is the ongoing monitoring of their websites visibility in the search engines. You need this information to see what’s working for your site and what isn’t so that you can “tweak” your activities or make any necessary adjustments to your site.

Always remember that SEO is not a quick fix solution. You’re not going to get your site into the no. 1 position on Google overnight, particularly for a competitive niche term. In fact, if you’ve found a way to do this then chances are it’s considered unethical or “black hat” SEO and is likely to get your site banned. You need to have a long term strategy that adheres to the search engines guidelines to get good rankings and maintain them.