Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential in order to be ranked high within the search engines. Not only will it help you to rank high, but your traffic will also increase dramatically from search engines, and from other websites as well. The traffic which you will get from the search engines will be more targeted, thus generating more leads for you. SEO will also help you to beat your competition to the number one spot.

There is on-page optimization, and off-page optimization, and both are important if you want to generate high amounts of traffic.

The on-page optimization focuses on the content which you have on your website. When the search engines crawl your website they look for keywords, and then they will send traffic to match those keywords. So the key is to place relevant keywords throughout your webpage in order for the search engines to rank your website for the keywords which you want to be ranked for.

Now that sounds easy, but there is a system which the search engines follow, and certain keywords are given more emphasis than others, and this is simply because of where they are located on the webpage. The search engines read your website from left to right, top to bottom, and the first keywords they find, will be given the most emphasis.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is not as important as off-page optimization, but you should take the time to make sure your that your website is optimized before moving on to off-page optimization.

The title tag is one of the most important place to put your keyword. This is where you should put your most important keyword that you want to rank for. Don't overload your title with lots of keywords, but rather keep it simple. One or two keywords within the title is enough, because the shorter the title will be, the more emphasis will be put on those keywords. Each webpage should have its own unique title.

Next are the Meta Description tags and the Meta Keyword tags. These descriptions and keywords should be unique on each webpage within your website for optimum results.

The Meta Description tag is very important to the search engines and sometimes will take this information to display within the search engine results. So write a catchy description with several good keywords to entice people to come to your website. This description should be no more than about 30 words.

The Meta Keywords on the other hand are not valued by the search engines as they used to be, simply because people were over-using them. But nevertheless, they are still valid when used correctly.

Keep these keywords to no more than about 300 characters; search engines do not apply any value to any keywords after 300 characters. You can use single keywords, or relevant keyword phrases that people might use to find your webpage. Do not use meta keywords which are not used within the content of the page. Neither should you use one keyword more than 3 times on one page.

When it comes to the content within the body, the most important keywords should be placed within the first 200 words. After this the search engines place very little emphasis on the keywords at all.

Use the h1, h2, h3, header tags to place more emphasis on certain keywords. These are valued more than simply using the bold tag to make them stand out. You can also bold the text, underline or italicize certain keywords, but don't overdo it.

If you have pictures on your webpage, you should use the "ALT" tags to name your pictures using relevant keywords. The search engines look at this description and use it to direct visitors to your website.

Place your keywords within the URL of the webpage. But don't go overboard on this one either. One or two keywords per URL is sufficient, because you want to keep your URL as short as possible.

Off-Page Optimization

Off-page optimization takes a little longer than on-page optimization. This involves getting back links to your website. The more links you have coming in from other related websites, the better your website will do. Every time a website is crawled, and finds a link on it to your website, the search engines will follow that link back to your website, and your ranking will increase.

But you should consider where you add your links because the search engines will look at a number of different factors to determine the value of each back link that you have. The most important factor is the ranking of the website that links to you; the higher the ranking the higher the value will be of that link.

They also take into consideration the amount of outbound links found on the website linking back to you (the fewer, the better), the number of inbound links (or back links) to the website, the page title, and the anchor text used in the links. The anchor text basically tells the search engines what the website is about, and if the text is related to the keywords on your website, then they will place a higher value on it.

To get these back links you can simply go to forums, contact other webmasters and request a link exchange, write articles, or comment on other people's websites.

When leaving comments on other people's websites, try to leave them on websites which allow the search engines to count the links. Some websites use a "NoFollow" tag within the links, which basically tells the search engines not to use this link as a vote for the site it is linking to. Thus the search engines place no value on these type of links.

You can also build your own group of websites, with one main website, and then have the other mini sites link to the main website. This means that you would have to do SEO for all of your websites, but the end result will be well worth it.

Building these back links is very time consuming, but it is essential that you do this if you want to succeed.