I am not complaining. Nor insulting your site. People are obviously finding it. Take our site (please, for all of you Henny Youngman fans. All three of you still alive.) We have analytics that indicate people have come in from search engines using just the word “web.” Our name is the most frequent search sending people our way and then we do pretty well for services we offer. But “web.” While we are a Web company, there are almost 4 billion competitors for the word “web.” We are happy someone found us that way but we are not really optimized for that. Also someone found us for “Custom programming in Gujarat.” We are not in Gujarat, not even in India. (We are in Cincinnati). So again we are happy someone found our site, but that might not have been an easily converted lead.

What we would like to be found for are terms like “Cincinnati Web design”, “MS Access custom programming,” “Custom Web applications,” things like that. And people find us for those. I know Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I understand it. I understand the unethical practices and the ethical ones (and use only ethical SEO practices), the ones that will get you banned from Google or Yahoo and the ones the search engines encourage. I understand Pay Per Click. And I know what we want to be found for. For all the knowledge I have and all the more available from my coworkers and on the Web, what I don’t know is what possesses someone to type in the word “web.”

I can’t control how people actually find our site. I can’t control how people search. I can control keywords on our pages, in our metadata, in our alt tags, in the navigation and everywhere else I should effectively and efficiently use them on the page. And you should hire a company that understands those things. A company that understands SEO is an ongoing process. Hire a company that knows how to add content, refresh content, use analytics to make decisions on effectiveness of your site and understands SEO as a holistic issue. A company should have a PR strategy, a links strategy, a social media strategy, a directory strategy.

Of course, all those effective SEO strategies won’t stop someone from finding your site after they type in “Flying purple snorklewhacker.” But do you really want to stop people from finding your site? Maybe someone that stumbles in decides to buy. And that odd search looks amusing in your analytics and your not losing customers by having the occasional strange visitor. It’s not like bricks and mortar store where the person wearing an intertube, flip flops, an army vest and Mickey Mouse ears, carrying a femur sends people scurrying away.