If really want to know how to make money online, then first get yourself a website. Once you have done that, use search engine optimization, or SEO, to give yourself the best opportunity for your site to be listed high enough on the Google search engine result listings as to provide you with sufficient free advertising to enable you to make money.

Of course, you need a product, but these are easy to find. You can sell somebody else's product under an affiliate program, buy the Private Label Rights to an ebook and change it to be your own, or even create your own. None of these is difficult to do if you know how to do it, and you have many different options as to the type of website you might want to use to make it easier for you.

I am going to skip what should be the topic of other articles, and go straight to SEO, because it is good search engine optimization that will get you a high listing. There are many ways in which you can format both your HTML/CSS and the text on your page to make sure that you get the best possible result given the keyword you are using, and the content of your web page.

Some of these involve optimization with the HEAD section of the source code, that is not seen by the reader but us certainly used by the search engine spiders in their algorithmic calculations of the relevance of your page to the keyword, and others with respect to the contents of the BODY section of your page, that both spiders and readers will see.

Before discussing these, though, let's first discuss keywords and what they actually are. Keywords are the most important part of internet marketing, but many people still do not fully understand what they are. If you want to make money online using search engine optimization, you have to fully understand keywords and their use in SEO.

If you are searching for information online for, say, the history of canal locks, you might use the term 'history of canal locks', or just 'canal locks', or even 'the history of locks'. These terms are keywords, whether they consist of one word or more than one. Let's look at 'the history of locks'. Google first removes what are known as the 'stop' words, such as 'the', 'a', 'of' and 'and'.

It then looks for web pages in their listings that contain all of the individual words left in your keyword, of which in this example there are two - 'history' and 'locks', then those that contain only one. If your web page has been listed, the search engine spiders will have determined the relevance of it to the keyword, and then to the partial keyword. It will then list all the pages it finds containing 'history' and 'locks' according to the calculated relevance to these words.

This is where your search engine optimization comes into effect: you have to persuade the search engines that your web page is more relevant to the search term, or keyword, than any other, and your success, or lack of it, will be reflected in your search engine position. Hence the importance of SEO.

You can emphasize that importance by including the keywords in your TITLE tag, that only search engine spiders will see, and also in H1 heading tags that readers will see. You can use the keyword in strategic positions, such as in your first 100 characters and in the final paragraph, and also restrict its use to no more than twice in your first 500 characters, and no more than around 4 or 5 times in a 400 word article. Some believe even that to be too many these days.

You also have to use language and vocabulary that allows the spiders to determine that your web page is about canal locks and not security locks, since the title 'the History of Locks' does not offer that distinction. That is where Google's latent semantic indexing (LSI) algorithm comes into play.

There are many other ways in which you can make money online using search engine optimization on your web pages, and once you have learned and applied these in your internet marketing campaigns you will have a better chance than most of getting your web page listed high in the Google listings, and those of the other search engines, and so getting you lots of free advertising that is critical to your success.