Find the right key words The most important factor in getting quality web traffic is to optimise your web pages for the correct key words. Getting the most sales is often a balance between search volume for key words and level of competition. Interestingly, the search term office space stapler ranks as well as red swingline stapler. Interestingly, the term red swingline stapler office space is a very popular search term with very little competition. The best strategy here would be to have a different page optimised for each of these terms. Use the Overture keyword tool and Google Adwords tool to research and identify your best key word phrases. It also pays to see what key words your successful competitors are optimising for.

Put your key word phrase in your title tag Forget about putting your company name in the title tag (unless it is a valuable part of the key words), it's a waste of words and will not help you rank in the search engines. The first three of four words in your title tag should be the key word phrase you are trying to optimise for.

Write a compelling description tag Title tags are for search engines, description tags are for humans. Spend time crafting a description tag that compels the reader to click on your listing. Come up with a great offer, use action words. Example: Get your own genuine red Swingline stapler here. Great prices, fast delivery, 12 month guarantee. 1000's sold around the world. As seen in the movie Office Space.

Use H1 tags An often neglected search engine optimisation technique is to put your key words in H1 tags on your page. This tip alone can drastically improve your search engine rankings. Similarly, the use of bold and strong html tags can emphasise a key word phrase withing the paragraph text where it may not be appropriate to use H1 or H2 tags.

Get quality one-way incoming links through article marketing As far as Google is concerned, link exchanges are just about dead. They can help to get you site spidered and indexed more quickly, but these day they add very little in terms of search engine rankings. A far better approach is to write interesting and informative articles and submit them to article directories. Make sure that you use the author bio/resource box to maximum advantage by using your key word phrase in the link anchor text, AND, by pointing the anchor text to the correct page. You home page may not be the best choice of pages for your selected key phrase. This will also ensure that more pages than just your home page gets indexed.

Get a decent key word ratio Aim for a keyword density of around 3-5% of the page contents. Try to weave your key word phrase into the page so that it reads naturally. Use headings and sub-headings that include your key words.

Use alt tags and description tags on images Key words used image file names, alt tags and description tags add to the key word density of any web page. They doesn't make a huge difference, but every little bit helps. In some product classes a Google image search may lead web surfers to your web site.