When you set up a shop you need customers to be successful. Every person that walks in through your door is a potential customer. The more traffic you have through that door the more chance you have of making sales. On the internet it is the same. To get that traffic to your site you either advertise using PPC and or optimize your site to get search engine traffic.

In order to get the traffic you require to run a successful internet business, you need search engine traffic. To get this traffic you need to be listed in the first 20 listings. The first 10 really needs to be your goal. This is the first 2 pages; Here are some thing you need to do.

The importance of the right keywords

What keywords to use, that is the question. You need to look for keywords that have a good number of searches each month and not too much competition. Too much competition will make it impossible to achieve your goal of achieving the top 10 listing in the search engine results.

Long tail keywords are better than a single word. A long tail keyword is a phrase made up of from 3 - 5 words. Some words are very popular. Take for instance "Internet Marketing". If you did a search on this you will find that there are thousands of searches each month. You will also find that it has far too much competition. Your chance of getting your site listed in the top 10 using this keyword would be almost impossible.

Here's how to optimize your site.

The title tag on you page is the most important tag. This is what Google uses for its listings. This tag is very important in Google's listings.

In setting up this tag, you need to use the keyword phrase that your research has helped you to choose. It is best to have this phrase come up early in your title tag. If you can use it twice in the tag, do so. You MUST use it at least once in this tag.

Another thing that is important is that you have a unique new tag for each page of your site optimized with your keyword phrase.

Another thing that can help is having an XML Sitemap. This won't help your rankings but it will help Google index your site changes more quickly.

It is important to use Robots.txt. This is the first file the robot will look for each time they visit your site. Having this file will reduce 404 errors appearing in your log file.

These are just a few of the thing you can and should do to help your page rankings and thus your listing position in the search engines. There are a lot of other things you can do but they will have to be the subject of another article.