SEO is a big word these days. It stands for "Search Engine Optimization," and it's the holy grail of web design. Search engine optimization really refers to the development of keyword strategies that make your website rank high in search engine placements ? giving you a spot in the top fifty, rather than in the top thousand. The most effective advertising technique online today is good placement in the search engines. If you are #996 instead of #23 in the primary listing for your product, the likelihood that a customer will find your site through Google to click on it is remote. And most traffic to sites these days comes through search engines. Without an optimized website, you probably will not make many sales. Start at the top. On a web page, before the title and anything else that appears onscreen, metatags should be filled in. If you look at the source of any website, (view ? source on most browsers), you'll see where the metatag description and keywords are placed. Choosing your keywords wisely, fill in the metatags first. Make certain your page title (that's the data that shows up in the blue bar at the top of the browser) uses at least some of the same keywords. And make sure your first page header does the same. Keywords should be carefully sprinkled through your well-written and edited text as well. That's it. That's all there is to SEO. But it raises its own questions. How do you figure out what keywords to use? Http://www.nichebot.com is a site that will suggest keywords for your site. You enter your main site theme (shoes, for instance, if you sell shoes) and Nichebot will return a list of keywords and keyword phrases in order of search popularity that you can then use on your website. There are several other keyword suggestion engines as well. How do you get the articles? This is more difficult. Some people can write their own, particularly those who have written for the Internet for a long time and have seen the changes along the way. But not everyone can write well, and not everyone has the talent for careful placement of keywords in text. Besides writing them yourself, you can try to get articles from an article broker, or you can download them for free from online article directories. Free, however, isn't always free. Articles you purchase from an article broker are yours to use as you will, without any strings attached. If you download from an online article directory, be warned: you are required to place a resource box referencing the article's author and his or her website on your page. You may not mind this. But if the author is a direct competitor, you're risking the loss of customers. How do you keep customers at your site, then? Providing customers with unique, easy-to-use information will make them happy and keep them with you. Don't advertise other services on your front page. Don't put up flashy animations on your website. And don't make it hard for them to find content. Regular fresh content is the best way to keep them happy with you. And if you have relevant content on every page of your website, your customers will stay longer, and the ranking of your website on search engines will go up. You can purchase articles from article brokers instead of using the online article directories. These articles can be published on your website as your original work, they aren't duplicated elsewhere on the web, and if they're good, your customers will continue to come back, hungry for more. Increasing Traffic The best way to sell your product or service is to keep new customers coming in, and keeping old customers returning. There are several ways to do this. First, you can provide free articles to article directories so other people will direct traffic to your website from theirs via your resource box. Second, you can ensure you always have fresh, accessible content on your site. Ebooks are another tool you can use. Put together a number of your old articles into an ebook, and provide it to your customers for free, with your name and web address embedded in the book's cover and at the end of the book. You can even use the ebook to direct them to special tools on your website. Yet another trick is to provide a free newsletter generated from your website. Allow customers to sign up to be on your mailing list, and send them regularly-published newsletters containing fresh articles not available on your website, information on sales and special bargains, and other things you think your customers would be interested in that will drive sales to your site. Newsletters ensure you have a constant pool of customers interested enough in your product to ask you to send them advertising; what better tool can there be?