If you are trying to make a living online, then your website is your source of income. Without proper search engine optimization—or SEO—you might as well be flipping burgers at the local fast food joint, because you will make more money there. 85% of people find the things they buy online through search engines which is why it is vitally important that you get a high search engine ranking. Trying to run an online business without good SEO or search engine optimization would be like trying to run a brick and mortar store out of a plain brick building without any signs. You might be lucky enough to get an occasional straggler walking in, but masses of people are never going to find you. SEO is that important. If you don't have a plan in place to get traffic online, you're just not going to get visitors to your site. And the search engines are a big part of getting traffic online (not the only, but one of the best if you want long-term traffic that you don't have to pay for).

So, how do you get a better search engine ranking? Mostly, you will get a better search engine ranking by building a better website. Now, this doesn't mean that it has to be fancier, prettier, or more high tech—sometimes those things can actually work against you—but it has to have better content along with good functionality. The search engines' robots don't care how pretty your fonts are or what colors you use on your website (these things may affect your conversion rate, however, so this is not to suggest they don't matter at all), but they do care about the words on your website. You see, the search engines use complicated algorithms to determine whether a site is providing high-quality content on their websites.

How does a robot know if your content is high-quality? They judge your SEO content by a couple of factors. They check to see if your keywords match your page's subject and how many times you use them. Too many can get you blacklisted as it will appear that you are just trying to get a ranking by using a keyword over and over. Too few and you won't get ranked for that keyword at all. SEO articles must provide a delicate balance between informing and entertaining the viewer and providing the right density of keywords in order to achieve proper search engine optimization for your website. And your content needs to be "fresh".

The same old SEO article left there for a year may pull in good search engine rankings in the beginning, but suddenly you website will disappear almost entirely off the radar.

Proper SEO can take some time and effort to learn, but the good news is that there are plenty of companies that can do it for you for a very low fee. Whatever the charge is will be well worth it in the end because you will be able to make a lot of money with your search engine optimized site.