SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is the art and science of making your site easy to find online through search engines such as Yahoo and Google. A site with poorly executed SEO will be difficult to find, which leads to a massive decrease in traffic or perhaps the traffic never existing to begin with. There are a lot of factors at play, including keyword choice, the speed of your site, proper page layout and compliant XHTML, alt tags for images and all sorts of other things. This isn’t purely social media, but if your voice can’t be found, then you can’t be heard.

Figuring out “where to start” with your SEO can be really complicated, and it can be difficult at first to measure if what you’ve done is generally the right thing. For this I recommend using a simple SEO analysis tool like our friends over at Hubspot make. They have a freely usable product called Website Grader (in addition to a suite of other similar tools like Twitter Grader, Press Release Grader, and the new Facebook Grader).

Website Grader will look at your website and give you a “score” from which you can hope to improve on. It then gives a detailed and long list of things that it recommends that you do in order to increase the optimization on your site. It doesn’t try to overload you with every SEO trick in the book, but gets you started on the basics. If you have a low score (out of 100), then you likely need to Google around for some resources (Hubspot provides some tips) and get to work on filling in the blanks. Working on your SEO is a good time to reach out on Twitter to more technical friends should you hit any roadblocks.

Once you get a score in the mid 90’s on Grader, I’d say its time to move onto bigger and more advanced subjects. I should warn that there is a huge amount of bad SEO advice online, companies trying to extract as much money as possible from you, and just tasteless techniques that might get you ranked high but you will lose loyal readers. One good source that I might recommend is a book from O’Reilly Media called Website Optimization. It provides a solid foundation for improving the SEO and SEM of your website.