I speak with a lot of small businesses and they have some wild ideas about what it takes to be successful online.

Periodically I’ll dive into their thinking and offer ways to work through the issues they face.

One problem is they don’t understand search engine optimization – SEO. I can explain that it involves selecting keywords and integrating them into a web site (source code and text). Some of them wonder what that really means.

When I share that the words should be on the web site (it really doesn’t happen without touching the web site), they wonder what that might mean to the design.

One business wasn’t real keen on disturbing the design with words (apparently everything is supposed to be pretty with text a part of images). I made the case for appropriate sections, touches of text. The business rejected SEO. I think it’s just because the overall look mattered more and the executive was not able to grasp what text and SEO could accomplish within a nice design.

Instead of welcoming SEO, the start up ignored it.

Later, the executive asked for SEO after the design went ahead with a design that didn’t favor SEO.

Now I’ll try to work with the design with the possibility that the design will need to be modified. It’s just a shame that SEO wasn’t given a chance in the first place.

When companies are all about the visual and skip the SEO strategy, they basically declare: “I want to limit my search engine visibility and let others get the visitors.”