SEO -- what is, and why it's important to me?

As you know, I have my shop at Cafepress, and all I keep hearing from other shopkeepers that have well established shops is how important SEO is to a shop, for building clientele and reaching higher sales. I have to admit, I had no idea whatsoever what in the world they were talking about -- this SEO stuff. I never was good at acronyms!

Well, I decided to do a little research on this SEO thing, and came to find out, through a web release for usweb.com that SEO stands for search engine optimization. Well of course it does, and it all makes perfect sense to me now.

For us little people out here on this big world wide web, it's hard to get noticed, when you're competing with all the big guys. I mean, say you're a little person like me, selling a few t-shirts online. Well, if you do a google search for "t-shirt", you're lambasted with 194 million, yes, million links! Now you're going to have a link there for every single t-shirt, t-shirt manufacturer, t-shirt collector, t-shirt artist etc. on the net. But with a little bit of creativity, and of course a little work on your site, through your keywords and content, you'll find yourself ranking higher up in the search engines, and of course the end result is a higher possibility of more traffic to your site, which may result in more sales, and more money in your pocket.

So having read this web release and checking out usweb's site, I now have better knowledge on what I have to do to bring my little shop up higher on the search engines. I guess I've got my work cut out for me!

Olivia