Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is by far the most important function of Internet marketing.

Search Engine Optimization is merely the art and science of making web pages appear attractive to the search engines so you will rank well for keywords related to your niche. SEO is an ongoing process of tweaking your website, getting high placement in search engines at search phrases, relevant to your web contents.

As a website owner you want search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN to rank you highly. Google decides which websites show up in those results based on a proprietary formula or algorithm. Google and other search engines carefully guard the algorithms that determine ranking to prevent manipulation.

Keywords within content is what drives search engines to your website. Search engines favors cleanly marked-up sites with solid content. Top rankings for popular keywords can bring hundreds of visitors to your site each and every day. So content, when sprinkled appropriately with keyword phrases will feed search engine spiders.

The key then is to make it easy for search engines to figure out what your site is about. Here some tips to make your site friendlier to the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization tips to identify several factors that help internet websites rank well:

Each page of your site should target a different keyword. Distinction such as, sail boats, canoes, power boats, etc.
Each page should target a single keyword phrase and that keyword should be featured prominently throughout that web page.

Place your keyword in each of the following places:

- title of your page

- description of your page

- header of the page (H1 tag)

- alt tag embedded in an image

- anchor test of a link

- bold somewhere in your text

Use your keyword phrase throughout the text, with good writing style. However, use common sense and discretion. Going overboard and packing your keyword phrase everywhere is called “keyword stuffing” and could cause the search engines to drop ranking significantly.

These simple on-page SEO tips will help you get top rankings for many long tail keyword phrases. But for more competitive keywords you’ll need tools like Keyword Elite and lots of backlinks.

Ranking well in the search engines for highly competitive phrases takes more than just on-page SEO tactics. It takes backlinks, more backlinks, and still more backlinks.

A backlink is simply when the owner of another website or blog links to your site. As you’ll see,
a few high-quality backlinks can be far more powerful than anything you do on your own website.

To search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, when someone links to your site it’s like they are voting for it. Someone thought your content was valuable enough to link to, so it must be important. The more people linking to your site, the more important it must be.

Even more important than the number of links to your site is the anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. For example:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>  This is Anchor Text</a>

The above is the html code for a link to a site called yourdomain.com. On the web page, the anchor text “This is Anchor Text” is what readers actually see.

Search engines see anchor text too, and they use it as a way of determining what your site is all about. This is why you want anchor text of incoming links to include your main keywords whenever possible.

So now that you understand why backlinks are so important, let’s look at ways to get them.

The biggest factor in getting people to link to you is to offer high-quality content that can’t be found anywhere else. Be different. Be controversial. If people think your site is valuable and unique, they’ll want to link to it.

You should make it as easy as possible for other websites to link to you. Set up a “Link to Us” page that contains snippets of html code they can just paste right into their site. Of course, you’ll make sure your keywords are in the anchor text.

i.e. <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>  keyword</a>

Write some articles and submit them to article directories. They’ll get picked up and reprinted on other sites with your link in the Resource Box.  A single article could bring you dozens of backlinks.

Try contacting a few sites within your niche and offer to write a regular column for them. Or work out an arrangement where you trade content so each side gets a backlink.

Submit your site to free directories that are related to your niche.

Find blogs in your niche and post comments to some of their posts. Be sincere, and you may even form a new relationship with the blog’s owner.