Ranking high in the search engines is critical to your business. Search engine traffic is some of the most valuable and profitable. Here’s why:

- Your visitors are searching specifically for your product or service – they are your warm, ready to buy prospects, interested in your goods and not turned off by advertising hype.

- Search engine submission will save you money. It’s free or very cost effective saving you hundreds of dollars in advertising fees.

Positioning in the search engines is important and not as hard as the SEO (search engine optimization) companies would have you believe.

There are many search engines on the Internet but three have emerged as the leaders: Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly MSN/Live).Google is the most used and probably the most relevant of all the Search Engines – and with your site in the top 10 ranking positions, you gain access to a steady stream of targeted, ready to buy visitors.

Google lays especial emphasis on content, link popularity and page rank. This means that they will take into consideration the amount of relevantlinks a website has. Google considers these links as adding extra value to the website and therefore serving their customers (the searchers) better. PageRank will reflect this, and ranges from 0-10 with 10 being the highest. Google also uses other criteria to further judge the rank of a website.

To be better ranked you need to optimize (SEO) your website.  Focus on these basic search engine optimization techniques:

- adding keyword rich informative content
- proper use of META tags
- building a quality site with proper on-site linking
- obtaining relevant backlinks

If you stick to the above basics you’ll do fine SEO-wize.

Here are some very useful resources you must check out before you do any SEO work:

1. I highly recommend you read Google’s SEO Starters Guide. You can find it here.
2. A nice fellow called Dan Thies is a genuine SEO expert. At his website he offers a free ebook on SEO which I suggest you download and read.