What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is a matter of placing the correct keywords in meta tags and, in particular,inside your web pages. So it is important to identify the right keywords (using, for example, Wordtracker, which we will discuss more below) and inserting these keywords in the body of your pages, including the Title tag, Meta Description and Keywords tag. Putting your keywords inside a H header tags is also recommended.

Choosing the Right Keywords: You need to choose the right keywords and meta tags to make your website search-engine-friendly, and all your webpages should always be optimized before you submit them to the search engines. Search engine optimization, or SEO as we call it, is vital because no one visits your website if they cannot find it on the first few pages of the search engine.

How do you get the search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing to find your website? Just choose high-demand, low-supply keywords (such as “free arial fonts”), and create pages that are optimized specially for these keywords. And of course, remember to choose these keywords that are only related to your website.

How do you find these profitable high-demand, low-supply keywords? It is usually not easy to find such words without any resources or software, so I usually use the following to help me in my keywords search.

1) WordTracker – one of the best tools to increase your website traffic and increase your visibility. This will help you to find the top niche keywords that are frequently searched on the Internet, and enhance your meta tags, title and document body. All you have to do is add suitable keywords to a basket, and their profitability will be determined using AltaVista as the search engine (for the free version. The paid version determines profitability using all the major search engines).

2) Keyword Analyzer – this software help you to generate hundreds and thousands of cost-effective keywords that you can insert into your webpages.

3) Keyword Elite – one of the best keyword research tools out there, so if you need to make your life easier, you might want to try it out. It is also a one time payment for a desktop software.

3) Site Build It! – This is an all-in-one site building tool that includes a fantastic keyword research tool called Brainstorm It!, as well as an excellent mailing list software. Well worth the investment indeed. Click here to find out more.

Here are some free tools (Google Keyword Tool and WordTracker’s free Keyword Tool) you can explore, although if you are serious about using SEO to improve your website rank, you should consider using the above three suggested tools.

However, do remember that search engines nowadays are getting smarter and more sophisticated, and it is important to concentrate on creating valuable, keyword-rich pages that your site visitors will like. In this way, the search engines will send their ‘spiders’ to rank your site highly, and its traffic will increase tremendously.

Now that we have found the suitable keywords, how do we optimize our pages?

Optimizing your website – The major search engines behave differently when it comes to choosing which websites to rank. Some seach engines use meta tags to choose, while some only rely on page content, looking at the words at the top of the page. What is even more frustrating is that these search engines are constantly changing their ranking rules (algorithms).

The following on-page search engine optimization rules are only basic guidelines, but overtime, they should help your website get better ranking if you implement them.

- The Title tag, which is perhaps the most important tag in your website, should be between 5 and 12 words, while the  Meta Description and Meta Keywords tags should be between 5 and 20 words.

- Title and Meta Description tags should be different, because this encourages visitors who are looking at a busy page of search results to click on your link.

- The Meta Keywords tag should contain words that exist in Title and Meta Description tags, as well as in your page content.

- Heading Tags should be used, if possible.

- The order in which you string your words are important. For example, webpage optimizing is not the same as optimizing webpage.

Talk to your webmaster if you are not sure what the above means. They’ll be able to enlighten you on the basic rules to follow. Ultimately, what is most important is injecting relevant content into your webpages, which will drive the most traffic to your website. Otherwise, read up on SEO on the internet. Here’s an excellent free PDF e-book by Brad Callen. You’ll be able to gain valuable insights from it.