If you want to build a successful business on the Internet, you can spend as much money as you can afford on a Google AdWords campaign and other forms of advertising. However, it has been proven in the Search Engine Marketing industry that at least 40% of the time, your clients will find you through Google and other search engines.



This fact alone makes it very important for any serious Internet business owner to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization. If you can't do it yourself, at least you can't be left in the dark on the methodologies if you decide to hire an SEO specialist.

And just what are these SEO basics?

Website Design and Navigation

These are the most important aspects of SEO. A website that succeeds with both search engines and website visitors are those that are easily navigated and are designed in simple HTML. When these two elements are combined, they make up for a good visitor experience and easy crawling by the search engine spiders.

Some of the things to avoid in website design are dynamic page and URLs, frames, flash elements, Java script, and image maps for web page interlinking or sitemap generation.

Keyword research

SEO is based on the premise that an unknown number of Internet users are searching for a host of things on Google by typing in search terms called keywords. If you want to know the popular keywords that is appropriate to the business your website represents, research exhaustively on keywords.

In deciding what keywords to use, there is one rule: ?the more specific the better?. If you own a dating site, for example, ?true love? or ?soul mate? might be too broad. Run the keywords on Overture and Wordtracker. You might find keywords that are more appropriate to your site like ?True love for marriage?, perhaps?

Keyword Density and Relevance

Search engines, specifically Google, determine what websites go to the top of your search based on relevance. This is determined in part by keyword density, or how many instances a keyword appears in the web page's content.

Write your content according to density. Do not spam, though. Aside from sounding gibberish, spam content also gets flagged by search engines and websites containing them are removed from the index.

Relevance and Inbound Links

Search engines also consider inbound links to your site (specifically, their number and quality) to determine your website's relevance to a keyword.

Make time to find the sites related to your website. Also make sure that the hyperlink to your site found on the other website has your keywords in them.

Don't scoop and link though. Google once penalized websites that linked with 200 to 300 other sites per month.

An Opportunity On Each Page

On each page on your website there is actually an opportunity for you to rank for a different keyword each time. Notice how two different pages by the same website are generated for the same keyword. Go ahead and assign different keywords to each. Write and optimize accordingly.