Do you know what S.E.O. is? Search Engine Optimization is the technique of "tagging" your web or blog pages with terms that fit the content within that page. It is an important part of activating your website's potential to reach people of interest through search engines like Google, Ask.com, Yahoo, etc.

I get asked all the time "what can I do to make my website reach more people?" These days my answer is invariably "S.E.O." Why? Well let me break it down for you a bit by walking you through what we're doing here at ScottsBigMouth to prepare for our new site launch.

As announced a couple weeks ago, ScottsBigMouth is morphing from just another run of the mill blog to a multimedia portal. Featuring my writing, my new podcast and multimedia show, and the contributions of our producers, friends, and readers/listeners/viewers; ScottsBigMouth is going to become a hub of activity from a multitude of different sources. ScottsBigMouth is changing to better serve the viewing/listening/reading audiences, and to provide a dynamite platform to match the creative work we're putting behind ScottsBigMouth The Show--which is slated for broadcast launch in a month or two (once we get the formula for our "secret sauce" just right!).

So that said, now we turn back to the mechanics of what must be done in order to maximize the exposure and traffic to the current ScottsBigMouth Blog. One of the things that must be done in order to insure that people are finding ScottsBigMouth as much as possible is that I am going back to EVERY piece that I've ever posted on ScottsBigMouth, and assigning a set of tags or "Labels" to categorize each post. Doing this in a smart and systematic way is what S.E.O. is.

The reason I'm doing this work (and it is a LOT of work) is to guarantee that the people who are looking for particular topics will begin to pull up ScottsBigMouth items when they search for "Hillary Clinton" or "schlock" in a web search. By tagging every item on the site in the way that I am doing it, I am providing a path of "virtual breadcrumbs" for people to reach the site. When this entire catalogue is done, it will be very easy for me to port those tags into the new ScottsBigMouth, and effectively create a very-well-documented set of cross-links between the new ScottsBigMouth and the old blog.

Once I'm done with the "tagging" part of the process, then I' go back to all of the search engines and "resubmit" the site to their search engines, with tags in tact. What this does is cause the search engines to look at each page of the blog in a particular light, and ultimately fine-tunes the way the engines pull up our content in individual searches. It is a technique that takes time, can be very tedious, but makes a heck of a difference in the level of traffic web sites get on a regular basis.

The long term effects of a systematic S.E.O. program come in several areas. 1. Raising web "hits" in searches for particular items in searches, 2. Raising awareness that ScottsBigMouth is a viable source of opinion, humor, political and media tidbits, and just crazy fun stuff, 3. As ScottsBigMouth becomes a bigger property, it will make it easier in the long term to track who/what/where/when/why people reach and participate on ScottsBigMouth, 4. When we begin to talk to advertisers in the Progressive communities, GLBT communities, Comedy communities, and Media communities; we will have a real, viable, and documented set of metrics to show as for where our "hits" come from...which raises our credibility with potential advertisers.

So those are just a few of the practical reasons why an S.E.O. program is very important to any small business web site or blog. Over time, like any smart business, ScottsBigMouth will offload these functions to an editorial and production team that will take day-to-day responsibility (either in house or contracted) to make sure we stay on top of the cutting edge, and keep building our web cred.