This post’s intended for the small business owners who are just beginning to master the art of SEO (search engine optimization)—and for those who may not even know where to begin. As opposed to giving you a laundry list of things to do to improve the distribution of your site content, it’s the most important to just know where to start.

The main goal underlying SEO is to have your site “found” by users entering a specific search query. Here’s an example: say, you sell flowers. In terms of SEO, the main objective, then, is to be “found” by users who type the phrase “sells flowers” into a search engine. Sounds easy enough. But, it gets a little more complicated when others sell flowers online as well. To filter the thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of online flower shops, then, search engines rank each website based on its relevance to the search query at hand — i.e. how relevant is your store to the query, “sells flowers.” How do they do this? They crawl your site for relevant keywords and content. No matter how fancy your site looks, the written word (keywords) dominates the realms of search engine rankings.

So, say you want to increase traffic to your site based on the relative popularity of a specific keyword (or set of keywords). How do you determine how popular some keywords are, as opposed to others? ”You can consult the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool to get some insights. Type in a potential keyword and the site tells you how many people are searching for it in a given month and how much competition there is, based on advertising spend for sponsored links” (Kevin Cain, Content Marketing Institute). In a very simple explanation, using relevant keywords matched with their popularity can (but doesn’t always) improve the distribution of your site content across search engine results pages.

To learn more about SEO and how to improve the distribution of your site, read Kevin Cain’s knowledgeable article, How to Optimize Content When You Don’t Know Jack about SEO.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity