A good product, a competitive price and a well designed website is not enough.

You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest with search engine rankings.

With every passing minute more and more competing sites are striving to optimize their rankings and if you become complacent, you will get trampled on and be left out in the cold, joining the hundreds of other failed e-commerce sites.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the tool that is widely used today by the majority of e-commerce sites, to keep their websites among the results that matter to people who search the internet for the products or information they need.

It is estimated that around 95% of people that use search engines use only the ten top search results, which means for most of the time, the first page of search results.

Making it among the top 3 on the first page is the benchmark of a sites success in search engine optimization. The probability of being clicked on is directly proportionate to the rank your website enjoys on that first page. The higher you rank, the more chances that you will be clicked on, hence the more traffic for your site, and consequently the more profits you pull in.

Having achieved a high ranking is no guarantee that you would remain there. It has become imperative, that you not only hold on to the high spot you have landed, but consistently strive to go one higher.

Every day is a new day, and with every new day comes the search engines re-indexation of your already indexed webpage Using this great SEO tool it is a matter of survival for you, to make your site better and better everyday.

what is search engine optimization one may ask?

Search engine optimization is the utilizing of various tools and methods to make your web pages get top ranking in the results of search engines.

Getting your website on the first page, and better still among the top five results listed on the first page puts your site in the lime light. It makes the searching public aware of your site's existence, generating the possibility of traffic that would lead to potential business and eventually the sought after income.

Search engine optimization is no child's play; it is a lot of hard, monotonous, laborious and repetitive work.

There is:

• On page criteria, and

• Off page criteria

And there is

• Visitor Visible criteria and

• Visitor invisible criteria

Whatever be the criteria, they center on the all important, currently popular, in use search term, key word or key phrase directly and indirectly connected to the product or service your website is selling. There are schools of thought that refer to this area as your websites' 'niche' or 'theme'

The search engine optimization of a web page for a particular keyword or key phrase is the:

• Arranging of the needed amount of 'visible' content laced with those keywords and key phrases in such a manner that it is grammatically correct and informative, making light reading without being too commercial, at the same time paying attention to

• (1)Keyword density, and

• (2)Keyword positioning

The second part is the arrangement of that keyword presence in the

• Meta Title Tags

• Meta Keyword and Description tags

• Header tags (h1 to h6 tags)

• Alt attribute tags

• Title tags (not to be confused with the Meta Title Tag)

• Html comments

• Link text of same site links

• Link URl's of same site links

• Link text of external links

• Link URL's of external links

The third part of search engine optimization is

• Liaising with like themed websites for links to be placed on their web pages pointing to your webpage that is being optimized, making certain at the same time, that the 'link text' or 'anchor text' used by the linking website contains the keywords for which your web page is being optimized.

• Creation of book marks on social book marking websites, again paying attention to the content of the 'title', 'description' and 'tags' used.

There are other factors that influence search engine ranking that cannot be manipulated by SEO tasks. Examples of these factors are:

• Age of website

• Keyword presence in the domain name

The optimization of ones web pages, I feel, is an in house task, and should be out sourced, ONLY as a last resort.

There are real good software packages available that examine and analyze web pages, comparing them with the existing top ten sites of any given search engine and recommends action to be taken in order to get listed within the top ten of that search engine.

There are hundreds of articles on the internet that deal with SEO and give concrete guidelines, tips and advice.

In conclusion, it boils down to this. With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high volume of traffic which is needed for a good business turnover and for you stay alive as a website.

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