Big supermarket chains are successful because they attract plenty of traffic through their doors. Each person that walks in through their door is a potential customer. Your internet business is no different. Your success lies in getting traffic to your site. Each visitor is a potential customer. The search engines play a huge role in getting visitors to your site.

In order to get the traffic you require to run a successful internet business, you need search engine traffic. To get this traffic you need to be listed in the first 20 listings. The first 10 really needs to be your goal. This is the first 2 pages; Here are some thing you need to do.

Choose The Right Keywords

In choosing your keywords you need to make sure that you can get it listed in the top 10. Some words have so much competition that it would be foolhardy to even attempt to use them. Trying to use these words would be a waste of time.

Long tail keywords are better than a single word. A long tail keyword is a phrase made up of from 3 - 5 words. Some words are very popular. Take for instance "Internet Marketing". If you did a search on this you will find that there are thousands of searches each month. You will also find that it has far too much competition. Your chance of getting your site listed in the top 10 using this keyword would be almost impossible.

Optimize Your Website

The title tag on you page is the most important tag. This is what Google uses for its listings. This tag is very important in Google's listings.

In your research you have chosen one or two keyword phrases that you will use. You need to make sure that this phrase appears in the title tag. Preferably in the beginning of the tag. It is important. This keyword phrase MUST appear at least once in this tag.

It is also important to have a unique title tag for each page.

An XML Sitemap can be helpful. While it does not directly affect your rankings, it will help Google to more quickly index the changes you make to your site.

Robots.txt is also very useful. This is the first file the Google Bot will look for. It will also help eliminate 404 error pages.

These are just a few of the thing you can and should do to help your page rankings and thus your listing position in the search engines. There are a lot of other thing you can do but they will have to be the subject of another article.