If you're new to internet marketing SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It means to change your websites to make them rank higher on the Search Engine listings.

It's not rocket science but it is the sort of thing you need to spend time learning a little about if you are interested in getting people to visit your website. Even if you are going to outsource your SEO efforts, you should at least know enough to be able to talk to the people you entrust to the task.

There are two main types of SEO. On Page refers to activities that occur within your website and Off Page, unsurprisingly, refer to activities outside of your website that increase traffic to it. Here we will focus on the On Page strategies. Keep a look out for the next on the Off Page strategies.

Website URL & Keywords

One of the best tips is something you should keep in mind right at the beginning, when choosing a URL. This is the address of your website. You should ideally know the search engine keywords that are most relevant to your website, especially if it's a business website. In my manual "How To Run A Business While You Sleep" I explain in much more depth, the research process that you would ideally follow before choosing a domain name but this article has a much narrower focus so let me say simply that you should try to make your domain name have your major keywords in it if at all possible. For example, if your website is about extreme sports events you would try to get a domain name like "extremesports.com"

Why? Because the name itself becomes part of the search engine criteria.

Keywords In Titles

You have a lot more flexibility with the title of your website than you do with your domain name but the principle is essentially the same. Use your website title to make use of your keywords while also keeping it descriptive of what your website is about.

Keywords In Descriptions

There is a description type used by search engines. This is the information you enter that appears in that couple of lines of text you see on search results pages.

Website Headers

Use your keywords in your websites headers. I'm not talking about the title for your web site but rather the headers that you use throughout the site.

Content

The search engines have long since moved past just using meta tags to searching the entire content of sites. Keyword saturation of 2% - 3% is a good goal in all your articles.

Keyword Placement

Try to ensure your keywords appear in your opening and closing sentences.

Highlighting Keywords

Try highlighting many of your keywords in italics, underline, bold etc.

Alt Tags & Images

Images are a great addition to any website. They also have Alt Tags that you can attach keywords to. Make use of them.

Don'ts

You may be tempted to load your site with keywords that are very frequently searched in order to increase the search engine ranking for your website. For example, you notice that a number of words related to the term "sex" score much higher in the search ratings than "extreme sports". You might think that if you sneak in lots of keywords related to these sex terms it would make your site rank higher in the search engine algorithms. There are two problems with this common form of reasoning.

Firstly, people who are searching for the term "sex" are not going to be interested in finding sites on "Extreme sports". This means that any traffic you might get through such a practice would not be "targeted" traffic.

Secondly, the people who program the search engines know as much about SEO as anyone else. The search engines seek out such deceptive practices and penalize the websites involved. There have been some notable cases of well known companies having all references for their company removed from search engine listings for engaging in this type of practice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mark Milton works from home doing the very things he talks about in his manual "How To Run A Business While You Sleep". To get instant access to his manual and V.I.P. forum, visit http://www.businesswhilesleeping.com