In marriage you try to learn everything you can about the other person so you can determine how best to interact with them, relate to their needs and help them learn something more about you. It's not quite like dating because when you date you often try to put your best face forward. Marriage often reveals those little flaws that are part of the human makeup.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a bit like marriage in that you attempt to learn all you can about SEO and then hope that the search engine learns enough about you to help you in the site rankings.

Perhaps the best way to describe SEO is a bold attempt to help search engines learn everything they can about you.

It's a bit like telling someone you have a 1972 Chevy Camaro for sale versus putting together a comprehensive portfolio of pictures, descriptions and graphs to help the potential buyer see the value in the car.

For years businesses have understood the primary reasons for presentation. Sometimes it is the presentation that is enough to push a potential customer toward a sale. The Internet is the cyber extension of that thought process.

A flashy web design might make an impression on a customer, but you have to get them to your site before they can be impressed. So the logical first step is to impress the search engines in order for customers to have an easier time finding you.

The search engines are constantly being refined to allow them to entrust great site rankings to great sites while punishing those who work with unethical SEO practices. Strive to show search engines you have developed a website that really does have a lot to offer through your adoption of consistent, and honorable SEO practices.

Interestingly SEO strategies mean little to your online customer, they just learn that when they go to your site it is nicely arranged, content rich and a great online experience.

The good news is your clients do not have to know the details of why you use SEO practices to benefit from the use of these online strategies.

Continue to work at helping search engines understand your business website. Ultimately you are helping present and future customers when you pay attention to the very things your customer could care less about.

In this case, what they don't know could ultimately help them – and you.