Search engine optimization is really pretty simple to understand. I often spend my days interfacing with small business owners who are brilliant at doing what they do best. They hire me help them with a “web site” or some sort of software application that they need. More often than not, these people’s experience with the internet has been limited, at best.

So I often struggle to help them understand search engine optimization, why they need it to enhance their web presence and how it is a critical component of their business. So, I mostly spend my 9-5 hours speaking in analogies and even hyperboles, because my customers will never (nor do they want to) understand short URLs, keywords, meta titles, meta descriptions, site maps, google page rank, inbound vs. outbound linking, robots.txt files, .htaccess files, no-follow tags etc..

So, why not just charge them and do it for them? Because, it’s better for me and for them if they at least understand where we are going. Could you imagine trying to get a friend to join you on a cross country road trip, but not be willing and eager to tell them and share with them that the final destination was the Grand Canyon. That would be terrible for both you and your friend. Even if you were going to do most of the driving, both of you would have to at least truly understand where the trip would take you.

If you are a novice at SEO or a small business owner who’s tired of people telling you that you should do it and searching Google right now for “why do SEO” than here is a great analogy that has helped many of my customers. Imagine we were standing outside of The New York Public Library, one of the biggest public and research libraries in the world.

Now, imagine I said to you, “hey, go in there and find a book, any book on the topic of, let’s say, magic tricks.” You would walk into the building and where is the very first place you would go? Exactly, the card catalog (or if you are post-’card catalog’-generation: the computers). You would use the card catalog or computers to SEARCH for “magic tricks.”

Imagine then if the library decided to remove the card catalog or computers … what would you do? You would have to roam around and through the many halls and scan the vast amounts of book titles and hope to, by luck, find a book on “magic tricks.” It would take you days, months and you would probably give up before you found a book on “magic tricks” and come back outside and say “I can’t find a book on magic tricks.” Exactly, the internet is no different than The New York Public library.

In fact, it is infinitely bigger with billions and billions of web pages. The internet, without a search engine, would be analogous to The New York Public library without a card catalog. The information on the internet would be rendered virtually useless because how could anyone find what they wanted or needed? They couldn’t. And, it is simply not possible to categorize and organize this massive amount of information.

So, for the sake of this analogy, the only way to find information on the internet is by using a search engine. There is no magic trick. If you have a business that sells, let’s say, screw drivers and you have a beautiful “website” with wonderful images and animations and video of all of your amazing screw drivers that people can buy … does any of that matter if people can not find your website?