You could spend thousands of dollars getting the most outstanding web site created, but if no one is able to find it you've wasted your time and money! Likewise, if you get thousands of visitors per day who could care less about the topic of your web site, you may as well be getting no visitors to your site as far as revenue is concerned. The point of optimizing your web site is to get more of your target market to find your site through their web surfing. More visits from your target market will result in an increase in revenue.

Additionally, a common mistake of individuals optimizing their web page is to believe it all has to do with specific keyword densities and the placement of the keywords within the page. There is much more to effectively optimizing a web site for search engines than keyword density, and this article will describe a few strategies and tips to help increase the number of visitors to your site.

Your first step to effective search engine optimization strategy is to understand exactly who your target market is. If you don't understand the people who would buy from your website or want the information you provide on your site, you can't optimize a page to increase your revenue. You should know whether your site targets other businesses, or whether you are targeting consumers as this will determine the tone of the site.

To effectively optimize a web site with your target market in mind, start by creating an extremely detailed list of who your target consumer would be. Provide their age range, gender, income range, and any other specifics that make up your potential customers. You should even consider writing down overly specific attributes to help you get a picture of your target market. For instance, a web site selling upscale baby clothes could describe their target consumer as: working mothers with an income of $60,000 or more annually, who drive a mini-van and have a live-in nanny.

Once you have a clear image of the people who are most likely to want the items you sell or the service you provide, you can then select keywords and phrases that these people might type into Google and other search engines in order to find your web site.

Make a list of related words and phrases, something you know your site is about. In the example above, you could say "baby clothes". You might want to use a keyword-picking tool such as Yahoo's to help you, or Google's Adwords Tool.

Once you've developed a list of keywords and key phrases that your target market might use when searching for information on the internet, use a service like Wordtracker or an SEO firm to check popularity and competitive factors for your phrases.

Armed with your target market information and a list of useable keywords, you can write (or re-write) the content for your web site in order to optimize it both for search engines and for the site audience. A good rule of thumb is to use pages that are between 400 and 500 words in length, and have 2 or 3 keywords in the text. Use each keyword one or two times throughout the text and you should have a decent keyword density. Make sure the pages read normally, however, there is nothing more sure to lose potential customers than having site visitors show up only to close your site when the information presented doesn't make any sense!

After your pages are written, you can use the meta tags of your page's source code to further optimize for search engines:

Meta Description Tag: Should provide a brief description of what the page is about, and ideally be under 150 words. Use one or two of your keywords if possible.

Meta Keywords Tag: This tag is actually rarely used by the largest search engines, but if you can gain visitors from any of the smaller search engines that do make use of this particular tag, you may as well make use of it. List the keywords your site is optimized for here, separated by a comma.

Title Tag: Likely the most important aspect of optimizing the source code of your page is the Title Tag. This is the phrase that is displayed in the search engine results as the link people can click to come to your site. See what your competitors are using, and try to make your title tag more compelling than theirs! Whenever possible, place your keyword at the end of your title. Google will make it bold and since most everyone else uses their keyword at the front of the title, yours will stand out in the search engine results!

Using these tips and strategies for search engine optimization will increase the number of targeted web site visitors you have, therefore increasing your web site revenue.