When someone uses a search engine they type in a keyword or key phrase and the search engine returns relevant results. The traffic you receive from this is referred to as organic search engine traffic. Search engine optimization increases traffic to your website and you will not have to pay one penny for it. Does that sound like something you might be interested in?

SEO can get pretty tedious and complicated but do not let that stop or scare you from optimizing your website. The effort will be extremely worthwhile when the free organic traffic starts rolling in!

Here are some basic SEO tips that you can use on your website right now.

1. Picking keywords of two or more words can increase your success rate. Choosing single word keywords usually have a higher amount of competition associated with them.

2. Insert keywords into the title tag of your web page so search engines know what your page is about. Failing to perform this simple step can result in your web page being ranked in a lower position when it does not deserve to be. Try to create titles containing the two or three choice key phrases that you are targeting. Make your titles relatively short and interesting. Your title will serve as a method of getting the visitor interested in reading your page further and increase the chance of the visitor clicking the link.

3. Another major SEO activity involves evaluating the link popularity of your website. Creating good quality links also improves your ranking with the search engines. The goal is not to link with any website, but link to websites that complement your content. Your website will get penalized by the search engines for linking to low quality websites such as free for all link farms. Link farms are websites that were created for the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity of a website.

4. Use the html bold tags or highlighting around your most important keywords appearing near the top of each page. You only need to do this once or twice. Do not use them everywhere the keyword appears because that does not help. Your most important keywords and key phrases should appear in the first few paragraphs of the text on the web page.

5. Submit articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. This creates high quality long-term links that stay active in the archives for years to come. You can also exchange articles with other website owners. The content of the articles should complement the content contained on both websites. This is much better than doing a simple link exchange because of shared content and search engines love to deliver high quality content in search results.