You've got a website, but in a sea of billions of web pages, how easy is it for people to find your website using a search engine like Google. SEO, or search engine optimization is the process of improving and increasing the traffic to your website. There's a huge industry of companies out there who specialize in getting your website to rank higher in Google and other search engines. There's also lots of scams with incredible-sounding promises. I get a lot of questions from clients about optimizing for search engines. Here's some resources to help you sort through the confusion and the hype.
Search Engine Optimization Expectations
A great video from Sage Lewis that covers the basics. Start with this. Listen to him. Believe him.
Search Engine and Your Website: The Basics
A cheesy little video that I made to try to explain the basics of how search engines work with your website.
Update: In July 2008, Adobe, the makers of Flash, announced that they had been working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files readable by search engines. So far, Google is the only search engine that can index Flash files on web sites. How well they are able to do this, remains to be seen.
