No matter how great your web site or how low your prices, if no one can find your web site you aren’t going to create sales. In comes SEO.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing your web site for organic search engines. A few years ago this simply meant stuffing as many keywords into your site’s meta tags. But those days are long gone and now the murky, mysterious topic of SEO is usually ignored because of it’s mysterious reputation.

But SEO isn’t as bad as it is made out to be. For the most part it really is just a set of common-sense guidelines that help the search engines find your site and your content with ease. This series will help you with the 10 most important thing you can do for your site to improve its organic search results placement. Keep in mind that along with good organic listings, industry specific vertical search engines like TopTenWholesale.com are important as well in bringing targeted wholesale traffic to your site.

In order to understand and really benefit from Search Engine Optimization, you need to understand how the modern organic search engine works and operates.

Almost all of today’s organic search engines use what is called a spider. A spider is an application run by a search engine company that goes all over the web visiting sites, indexing them, and ranking them on various conditions. Spiders find pages by following the links on each site it visits. This means that the more sites that link to your site, the more times you pages will get indexed giving you a higher page rank. This is just a brief overview of how search engines crawl the web. For a more in depth description try reading the Wikipedia article on search engine optimization.

Now that you know how search engines work, you need to know how to optimize (key word here folks) your site for these spiders. I am going to outline what I believe to be the Top Ten for your site. Don’t be intimidated if you don’t understand what everything means. E-mail me with any questions and I’ll do my best to clarify. Also keep in mind that there are no guarantees for improving your site’s listing. Be weary of companies promising #1 listings as this is impossible to do.

1. ) The Title Tag. The title tag is what tells the browser what to display at the very top of the web browser, is the name saved for bookmarks, and is displayed in the search engine results pages. In addition to all that, a relative and descriptive title is key to increasing your page rank. Try and stick to a common naming convention like “PageName – Section Name – Site Name.” For example… if have a men’s clothing page in the urban wear section on your wholesale apparel site, a good title for you page would be “Men’s Clothing – Urban Wear – Your Wholesale Apparel Company.” Not only will this give your page a higher rank, but it will give web surfers a clear and concise listing in the results pages of search engines. Be careful not to stuff your title with keywords. Spiders are getting smarter everyday and these so called “Black-Hat” practices could lower your ranking or even get you banned permanently from a search engine.

2.) Keep Important Text (links, company name, etc.) as Text, not Images. It is important to remember that spiders are computer programs, not humans. This means that a spider cannot extract your company name or any other relevant information from an image. Try to keep images for graphical information and actual text for textual information. If you must use an image, be sure to include the alt attribute with a relevant description.

3.) Get Linked! Google has made it’s internet search empire based on the fact the quality, relevant site will have other quality sites link to them. While this is true, it makes it hard for a small or young company to get a high page rank. This makes the things you can do to get linked very important. First sign up for industry directories. For wholesalers and wholesale companies site like WholesaleU.com and OffPriceNetwork.com offer an affordable way to get quality links to your site (not to mention the wholesale traffic) and increase your rank.

That’s all for this week. Check back next week for part 2 in my 3 part SEO for Wholesale Companies series. As always feel free to leave a comment or e-mail with a question.

-Brad