Ever think that SEO (search engine optimization) is way over your head? You’re not alone. Many business owners think it is something they’ll likely never understand. But the basics are not out of reach. In fact, there are ways to help your site achieve better search results on Google that are easy to understand.

In this first post in our SEO Basics series, we’ll cover some definitions to help you with the fundamentals of SEO. After all, how can you optimize something if you know nothing about it? Think about your website from the perspective of your visitors – that’s what Google attempts to do. They have a sophisticated system with which to do it, but under all the algorithms, it’s just a way to evaluate the usefulness and relevance of your site.

Here are some concepts to consider:

Index – this is the “dictionary entry” of your site, or snapshot of what it contains. When a search engine, such as Google, finds your website, it creates this entry to reference it among the billions of others. You’re adding a recipe card in Google’s website cookbook, so to speak.

Crawl – the act of search engines using their many interconnected links and other clues to find new sites and updates to existing ones. Crawlers are software in a constant process of keeping Google and other indexes as current as possible.

SEO – as we mentioned, this is search engine optimization. It is making a website’s features as attractive as possible to those crawlers so they can do their jobs. And guess what happens when they can easily get all the information they need to index from your site? Your page moves up in the ranks.

Now that you know a little more about how search engines actually search, join us next time when we’ll cover Google-friendly websites.