Mastering the art of search engine optimization can make you very, very wealthy. That is certainly a heavy statement, but I believe it is true. Any website which can top the rankings in all three major search engines has unlimited potential to be exposed to an extraordinary amount of people all over the world. But is SEO an art or a science? In fact, it is a bit of both with a pinch of luck throw in for good measure.

When you are wanting to 'SEO' a website, there are several aspects you need to pay attention to. The first is on page optimization. This consists of your text, headings, images, coding, and general website structure. On page optimization, if done well, can land you some nice search engine rankings on the MSN Search engine.

This is all well and good, but what we really want to do is rank well in Google. How do we do that? With off page optimization! I will get to that in a moment, before that I will briefly explain the difference between on page and off page search engine optimization and how you can improve each one.

On page optimization:

Put simply, you need to ensure each of your website pages are targeting themselves to the specific keywords you have chosen. This means your titles, eadings, content text, URL, image alt tags and hyperlinks should be displaying keywords for which you want to achieve a search engine ranking for. This does not mean spamming and using the keywords over and over again. Successful on page optimization will subtly yet effectively display particular keywords. In the case of your main content text, a keyword density of around five percent is sufficient. Hyperlinks pointing to other pages should display anchor text keywords which relate to the page being linked to.

Off page optimization:

This is where it gets interesting! While you may get away with simple on page optimization for a good ranking in MSN, if you want to rank well in Google you have to start thinking of what's happening AWAY from your website. Sound strange? What you need to pay attention to is WHO is linking to your website and HOW they are linking to it. Your goal is to gain as many links to your site from related websites as is possible. You also need to strictly police exactly how these other sites link to you as well. By now you should have a nice amount of keywords you are targeting. These incoming links need to use your keyword text as the anchor links - this way Google knows which keywords to rank your site for.

The more incoming links you gain from well respected, popular websites, the better your search engine ranking will be. There is no two ways about it, this is THE way to rank well in Google and correspondingly, be seen by the millions of users of the most popular search engine in the world.

On page and off page optimization are the two broad areas of search engine optimization. Above all these, providing quality content on your website is still the best way to win new and returning visitors. It is also the easiest way to gain back links - if your website is seen as an authority site in a particular niche then people will naturally want to link to it with no further effort on your part. It doesn't get any easier than that!