Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the right targeted keyword/phrases that are most related to your website and ensuring that this gets your site highly ranked in search engines, so that when people searches for specific keywords or phrases your website, Blog or Squidoo lens shows up in top spot. SEO basically involves fine tuning of the content on your site along with the HTML and Meta tags which involves the link building process.

The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines keep their methods and ranking very secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and not to include spam pages from congesting there results. The search engines use hundreds of different factors while ranking the listings of websites where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. The weeding out process can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #340 in another search engine. New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines to be listed.

A small link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site but with the new 2.0 ways to get indexed you can have your site indexed within 2 days, using sites such as digg, yahoo answers and squidoo you are almost guaranteed quick results.

If you do not know how to research, choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you want, they may also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

So stick to the simple methods if you do not have the money to hire people.

Keyword in domain.
Keyword in heading.
keyword within content.
keyword highlighted within content.
keyword in meta tag description.

Also when researching your project/topic/niche use a good keyword tool to see how much traffic you will be able to attract, i used to promote the good keywords tool but now i highly recommend wordtracker.

Having a business plan is the most important part when beginning your online journey. Making sure your mind is not fully focused just on money, don’t get me wrong getting quick cash fast is great but creating a passive income is so much better.

Questions to build by…

1. How much money do you want to make?
2. How will you monetize your new website business?
3. What market are you going to get into?
4. What is your marketing plan/strategy & how will you attract new customers?

1. How much money do you want to make?
This is your stepping stone it gives you a goal to work towards, say for the month you would like to make $500.00 then you have to think about the next question…

2. How will you monetize your new website business?
There are hundreds of ways to monetize your online business. Go to the “make money…” page to see some options that I use, there are plenty of other ways to monetize your sites. Maybe some of the products I promote will not fit your market so type into the search engine “your product affiliate” then sign up then you can advertise for those products.

Example:
I make 1 affiliate web site selling Acne Skin Cream that sells for $25.00 and in order to reach my goal of $500.00 per month I would need to sell 20 units of the product, that’s 5 per week.

3. What market are you going to get into?
Choosing your market is most probably the hardest part, well not choosing the market but choosing a profitable market like…

Make Money, Weight loss, Insurance, Travel etc. With these markets you know you can make money, why because they are already very profitable, How do I know because I have sold products in these markets.

4. What is your marketing plan/strategy & How will you attract new customers?
Having a strategic marketing plan to get traffic to your website is a absolute must! Getting to the top of search engines for free and getting top spots for keywords is the best way to get continuous get traffic. Go to our 20 free traffic generation techniques to pick the best way for your website to get new customers, or your other option is to purchase traffic from search engines.