Before spending huge amounts of cash on marketing and advertising campaigns, did you check if your website is search-engine friendly? That is, if people can find your site by searching for your product on the search engines? A major part of an online business' customer base are visitors that are redirected from search engines. These people are actually some of the most targeted visitors for your product, and it is important to pay close attention to them. To properly tap into this customer base, SEO is required.

In most cases, it is extremely beneficial to incorporate SEO into the design process itself--in other words, while designing and creating the site SEO is already being performed on it. For instance, you might have a nicely-constructed, well-functioning, and product-rich site with lots to offer, but its visibility in search engines is limited because of dynamic pages or frames. This means you miss out on a great many potential customers, and you might start thinking about embarking on a massive advertisment campaign--which will cost a lot and results might not be guaranteed. SEO is a cheaper alternative (sometimes even free if you can do it yourself), and a well-optimized site is definitely going to attract visitors.

So you hired an SEO specialist while designing your site, and now it's fully optimized even before launching. Does that mean you should completely forget about SEO in the future? Absolutely not. SEO is a continuous process. Some practices in the past are not effective anymore today, and some of today's practices will also be ineffective in the future. It is important to perform SEO on your site regularly, especially monitoring and promotion of your site. Making a top-notch site isn't an easy task, and has no rules set in stone, but there are a few pointers you can observe that do work.

Remember to use keyword-rich text. Search engines work with text, and they work with the easiest-to-find text. Putting these two together, you can now determine where best to place your keywords: at the top, specifically, the title and the headers. However you also have to remember that you have human readers as well, so make sure it reads well to a human. Place keywords in the beginnings of paragraphs.

Help make the crawling process faster by using lots of internal links on your home page. The faster your site gets indexed the faster it becomes visible. Try not to use dynamic links too much. Dynamic links are links with question marks on them. Many search engines cannot follow this, so if possible use static links only. To really help with the crawling, provide a site map. A site map is a link list of all the pages in your site. Site maps will help your pages get indexed faster. Also, be sure to put a link to your site map on your home page because that's where the spiders start crawling.

Another thing to remember when linking to your pages, or linking in general: use keyword text in them. If the page you are linking to is about blind salamanders, then naturally your anchor text (the text in the link) should contain "blind salamanders" somewhere. This will also help boost your search engine rankings.

Finally, use meta tags. A title, some keywords, and a description really pays off. People see these in the search engine results, so make it really descriptive and compelling. They should also be unique and applicable to their own pages.

It doesn't really matter when you involve an SEO specialist in the design process, but doing this as early as possible can help prevent mistakes and costs. Remember also that it is a continuous process, so don't just leave SEO forever when you think you're done with it.

Many people uses search engines in their searching activities. They enter keywords or key phrases on search input boxes to be able to find what they need. They also wanna make sure that they can get the most relevant information. Search engines acts as the bridge between human and information all over the Internet. It is important that their satisfaction live up to the expectations.

When a human actually uses a search engine to find a specific product or service, the search engine looks at its index of the web and displays a list of results. That list of results is based on a high relevancy from the keywords being searched, with the most relevant results on the first page. A properly optimized website with relevant keywords and keyphrases will receive highly targeted traffic from highly potential clients.

Many search engines quote relevancy as a high percentage in displaying search results. Each search engine uses a different algorithm to calculate relevancy. Most use a combination of on-the-page and off-the-page factors. Examples of on-the-page factors are whether the keywords appear in the page title or meta tags, and how often the keywords appear in the content area of the page.

In order for a website to be listed in the first page of search results, it should be required that the site be optimized with relevant information. Make sure that your website covers similar search terms to maximize your visibility in the search engines for your particular products and services, especially if you happen to sell these products.

Search Engine Optimization is the best option we can have in order to improve our site rankings and increase our monetization. Proper SEO together with Relevancy plays vital roles in order to achieve the goals we're aiming for. Let us also keep in mind that providing excellent service that will satisfy our clients are still the best priority we should focus on.

Many people mistakenly think of SEO as an afterthought, like the garnishing on a cake or the landscaping around a house. This is one of the worst mistakes an e-commerce newcomer can make. SEO is far from being an afterthought; it is part of the site design and creation process itself. Make sure to hire an SEO specialist (or do it yourself if you can) before actually creating your site, because you should take your target audience into consideration for the architecture of your site. For instance, the words used on your site's navigation, categories, and the links structure can really help push your site to the top if you use the proper keywords in them. Furthermore, you should put yourself in the shoes of your visitors: would they find browsing through your site enjoyable or easy? If the design is too complicated, it might create a wall between you and your visitors. Search spiders will also have a hard time crawling through a site with a messy link structure. SO be sure to have an optimized design plan before creating your site.

Another big mistake is the use of 'splash pages'--pages that do nothing but scream the name of your site or your brand, with a link that says "Enter" somewhere around, or a Flash movie that you must sit through before you can actually see the site's contents. It might look cool, and some sites do make use of these--but usually sites that do are extremely well-established and people know how to get to them without the use of search engines. If you're just a budding new business who's yet to leave a mark on people's minds, this is really one of the worst ideas ever. Your home page should act like a table of contents for your site, while also giving a warm welcome to your visitors. (A table-of-contents only page is called a site map.) It should also help you attain higher rankings. This is the main reason why such pages aren't recommended. Splash pages lack keyword-rich text, usually have only one link, and usually have redirects. Keyword-rich text helps your site rank higher for your keywords. A single link tells search engines that that page is the only important page in your site (which it obviously isn't). And redirects are usually ignored by search engines because of the possibility of abuse. Remember to design your homepage so that it creates an impact in both the visitors and the search engines.

Sometimes, a website will either have too much text and too little images, and vice versa. You need to balance between HTML-formatted text and graphic images. On one end, a site that is mostly huge blocks of text and little if any images, while it may do well with search engines, is a sign of an amateur, and people know better than to trust their money with amateurs. On the other end, a site with little text but lots of pictures or Flash animations just won't rank in the search engines. Take for instance a Flash-only site. It might look like it's a full website just made to look better with Flash, but in reality it's one page and one giant Flash movie, which search spiders will ignore. Striking a balance between both will earn you the trust and patronage of both humans and search robots.

Lastly, and most importantly, keep in mind that most of your visitors will be coming from search engines. In other words, they find your site through the queries they enter in the search box. The visitor is looking for something, and you are there to give them what they want. Don't try to make a personally-satisfying piece of art with your website--save that for your personal blog. Instead, focus on what your customers want to see and what is pleasing to them. In no time many of those visitors will be converted into customers, and you should start making cash. Good luck!

Some people might find that, despite having done some SEO on their website, traffic still isn't rushing in like they expected, and it's been quite a while. It's not that your product or website is bad. Maybe you just overlooked some things. Try looking over this short list and see if there's anything in here that you forgot:

1. Did you use text instead of pictures where it matters? Specifically, for keywords. Also, don't let the pictures speak for themselves--the search engines won't ever find you this way. Accompany images with text underneath, and don't forget the alternate text attribute.

2. Did you try to cover all possible keywords? Some people might avoid doing this on their websites thinking it might constitute keyword stuffing. But there are accepted methods to cover all the possible keyphrases for your product. One of these is articles. With several of them, you can feature many, many variants of your keyphrase without having to resort to keyword stuffing. For instance, if you sell used video games, one article might use the "used video games" keyphrase while another can use "second-hand video games" or "pre-owned video games", etc.

3. Did you pick a good URL? The best URL is one that is descriptive of the nature of your business. If your top keyphrase is "used videogames", something like www.used-videogames.com would be the best. Do not register a domain before consulting someone who is knowledgable at keyword strategy.

4. Did you title your pages properly? "Article" or "Home" don't really cut it. Neither search engines nor your audience will find this very enticing. Try a descriptive title; for instance, if the page is an article about used video games, you can call the page "Free article on used video games". The home page, you can call "Used video games store" or something similar.

There are many, many things you can do to gain at least the first few pages, if not the top spot, of search engine rankings, but these are the things that people usually miss. Keep them in mind, and watch your rankings shoot high up.