When promoting your newly created website, you want traffic from as many sources as possible. That's because as an online business owner, you want your business to be as stable as possible. If there is any chance of a traffic source drying up, it will cause some inconvenience to you but your online business can continue to thrive. There are many different sources of traffic, and one of the most important source of traffic, is from the search engines. For many websites, the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search) deliver as much as 90% of the traffic. That's why webmasters are spending a lot of time, energy and resources on promoting their sites, so that they can rank high in the search engines. Once a site gets ranked for various popular keywords, the website continues to get a constant stream of targeted traffic. And often, this traffic source converts very well, which means more sales for the website owner. The process of getting high rankings in the search engines is called search engine optimization (SEO). This used to be a tightly guarded secret. Because whoever knows how to get their sites to rank in the search engines can look forward to making a killing. But today, SEO is no longer a secret any longer. Over the past few years, bit by bit, the cat has been let out of the bag. Now, anyone can visit a webmaster forum or an Internet marketing blog and learn all about SEO. It's a process that's simple enough, as you will soon find out. There are two major components to the SEO process: (1) Internal page factors, and (2) External page factors. When done rank, it's very hard for competitors to rob you of your search engine rankings. Once you understand more about this process, you will begin to see why. (1) Internal page factors. Always start with the internal page factors when doing SEO work. That's because you have control over what you want to create for your own website. If you know what you are doing, all the internal page elements required for SEO can be completed in a single day. There are several factors that you should take note of. For starters, make sure that you place important keywords in your page title. This is, by far, the most important factor. If you don't, you can still rank your pages, but it's going to be an uphill battle. Also, remember to sprinkle important keywords throughout the content of the web pages. Don't overdo it. As long as everything appears natural, you are doing fine. Next, include Meta tags in all your web pages. Meta tags are not visible on your web pages, and they are not part of your content. But search engines look at them for relevancy, and will often display the Meta tag description in the search results. Finally, make sure that your URLs appear as static URLs. That means your web pages should be named something like "my-important-keywords.html" instead of "mypage.php?id=5". Some content management systems still use ugly looking query strings like the example given. Try to avoid them as much as possible. Use Wordpress as your content management systems whenever possible. You can configure it to look like a personal blog or a corporate website. And all your URLs can be set as static URLs, so that solves your problem. (2) External page factors. This is where things can get a little tricky. Unlike internal page factors, there is limited amount of control over external factors. There are 2 external page factors you must know. First, what is your link popularity? That means how many websites are linking to your web pages. These links are also known as back links. The more back links you have, the higher your chances of being ranked in the search engines. Secondly, the texts in the links matter as well. These texts are known as anchor texts. So if the links pointing to your site says "gardening tools", then your site is likely to come up in the search results for the keywords "gardening tools". When you combine the above 2 factors together, you know what you have to do. You have to constantly get other webmasters to link to you. The more back links you can get, with your desired anchor texts in them, the better. This is why it's a little bit tricky because you don't own these other websites. So how do you get others to link to you? One of the quickest way to do this is to submit your site to search engine friendly link directories. These are often free, and if it requires a small submission fee, this fee is often nominal. If you are targeting Google, remember to watch out of page rank. Page rank is Google's indication of how important a website is. Authority sites tend to have higher page ranks. So you want to get your site listed in authority websites. These links are more valuable, and will get you better rankings. Recently, a few high quality bidding directories have sprung up in various webmaster communities. The way bidding directories function is very similar to ordinary web directories, except that the highest bidder gets top position in the directory. That means whoever bids the highest, also get to enjoy the most advertising exposure. In addition, most web directories also offered featured links. Featured links are displayed prominently in certain sections of the web directory. Buy featured links if you need to promote your website urgently. In summary, there are 2 major components you need to take note off. For internal page factors, pay more attention to the title tag, the meta tag, and the URLs. For external page factors, your back links and anchor texts matter the most. Your SEO efforts will only see good results when everything is done correctly - that is, both components are taken care of. Most webmasters find it harder to build back links, but this can be easily overcome by submitting to high quality web directories.
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