Visitors find websites in several different ways. One of the most popular ways is to do a search for a keyword phrase.

Therefore for you to have a chance to get some of that traffic you need to show up in the results on a search engine for as many keywords as possible. You can do this by optimizing each of the pages on your website for a different keyword phrase.

The biggest error that many people make when optimizing their site it not targeting any specific keywords. Not only that but they really never understand what keywords people are searching for to start with.

Ignoring this is probably the biggest mistake you can make. You should be developing a keyword list that is hundreds or thousands of words in length. Then you should be optimizing each page each around an individual word and only that word or phrase.

You can become an Internet spy and look at some of the pages of your competition. Most of the websites that rank high on the search engines have done an excellent job of targeting individual keyword phrases.

To understand how difficult it will be to get a top ranking in the search engines take a look at the websites that are on the first page of Google for your keywords. You should not copy them specifically, but you can use them to give you exact examples of what search engines are looking for in terms of an optimized webpage.

You may not be able to beat your competitors on some of the more competitive phrases, but you will be able to quickly get on page for lesser searched on phrases if you optimize a webpage for those.

These keywords are called longtail keywords and can bring you a great amount of traffic if you can get on the first page of results for as many of them as possible.

Setting up a webpage for a targeted longtail keyword phrase is very easy to do. Here are the things each page should contain.

1. Include your main keyword phrase in the title tag of your web page.

2. You should include your keywords in the meta tags for the description and keywords as well. Meta tags are not as important for the majority of search engines these days, but it doesn't hurt to at least list the keyword phrase that you're targeting for that page.

3. As you develop your webpage you should include headline tags and your primary keywords should be in the first headline tag (H1 tag).

4. In the text of your page you may also want to bold, underline or italicized some of the keyword phrases in the first paragraph, and in the last paragraph.

5. Be sure to include your keyword two or three times throughout the web page, including the top and the bottom of the page.

6. If you are including any images on the page add your keywords to the alt attribute of one or two of the images.

7. Write your web pages for visitors rather than only considering the search engines. If you write unique high quality content you have a much better chance of getting traffic from the search engines.

In summary, the best way to go about optimizing your website for search engines and get as much free traffic as possible is to target specific keyword phrases and set up individual webpages around specific keywords.

This is not nearly as complicated as it sounds and can bring you a tremendous amount of traffic when done correctly.