When search engines look to retrieve information, their biggest consideration is the text on the web site. This includes text that is both visible and invisible.

Although your web site may be filled with text, if it is not properly instituted, the engines won’t recognize it so your 10,000 word web site, might as well be virtually blank.

Even if you have a visually stunning site that includes audio, videos and cool graphics, the engines won’t see all of your hard work and instead may skip your site and return with one of your competitor’s sites to display at the top of the search results page.

Text in this sense means more than the letters used when designing your copy. In order for the search engines to see your site, it needs to be in HTML coding.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and this is what the search engine spiders see when they crawl around the net, indexing pages.

Don’t worry, it sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Search engines and spiders will be discussed more in Chapter 4, but for now it’s important to introduce you to the terms used in SEO.

Using HTML means adding tags to the title and body of your website so that the engines can find it. For example, if the title of your page is Any Realtor in Any State, in HTML the search engines would see,