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Have you ever heard about stories on those online entrepreneurs who hit it big after getting a #1 rank in several popular search engines? You must be wondering what it would take for you to achieve that #1 spot in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Search Engine Optimization, or commonly known as SEO plays an important role to ensure that your business gets the best possible search engine ranking. This will eventually leads to increased sales for your online company.

So, what is exactly Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is the process of amending the content and the meta-information (i.e. Meta-information includes certain HTML tags such as title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags, as well as the internal [links between pages on the same site] and external [links between pages on different sites] link structure of a web site). This is to improve the search engine ranking of the page.

What will be the sales impact if my website is being listed as one of the High Search Engine Rank? Do you know that Internet market research estimates that between 70% and 90% of online shoppers use search engines to find a specific product or service. As such, you can see how effective search engine optimization can boost your revenues.

There are a total of three metrics to forecast online sales. They are the average ticket, the conversion rate, and the amount of web site traffic. Lets me explain each of the metrics to you. The average ticket is the amount of money spent by a customer on a typical transaction. Typically, bookstores have low average tickets while on the other hand computer and electronics stores have high average tickets.

Web Site traffic is measured by the number of site visitors. It is normally expressed as the total number of page views per month.

Conversion rate is expressed as a percentage and was calculated through the number of sales divided by the number of page.

As such, achieving a high search engine rank will definitely increase the number of page views, and could therefore increase sales. Bear in mind that a high search engine rank will produce a measurable increase in traffic only if there is significant marketplace interest in your product / service. Note that search engine optimization is not going to help to produce measurable results if there is very little demand on your product or service. Lets us look into this way, the #1 spot in search engine result pages is not particularly impressive if only two people search for your product or service each month.

What is the role of keywords being used in the Search Engine Optimization?

Keywords are words or phrases users provide to search engines to locate information. Search engines examine page content to determine whether a specific page is relevant for a particular search word or phrase. Thus, effective keyword selection is one of the keystones of search engine optimization.

Each keyword is characterized by supply and demand. Supply refers to the number of search engine result pages and demand refers to the number of searches.

The easiest way to improve search engine rank is to select keywords that have favorable supply-demand characteristics; that is, ones with a relatively high demand and a relatively low supply. It is much more difficult to improve the search engine position of a page on a high supply, competitive keyword.

Good keywords should be relevant to your product line and your line of business. For example, a #1 rank for health supplement product is worthless if you sell Health equipment. A potential customer will find your page, quickly discover that you don't sell any Health supplement product, and promptly go elsewhere. In effect, the conversion rate for irrelevant search engine hits is very close to zero.

Choosing a set of target keywords is the first step in search engine optimization. The second step is using them in the body, title, headings, and meta-tags of a page.

Do not overdo it by including target keywords in the text of the page. The keywords should fit smoothly into the surrounding text. Search engines are smart enough to detect excessive keyword density, or too many keywords stuffed into very little supporting text. It will definitely reduce your page ranking accordingly.

The title tag should contain information that describes the page. Unless you operate a multi-national corporation that is already a household name, your company's name should not be a descriptive title. Most search engines use the title tag as the first line of your listing in the search engine result pages.

Incorporate keywords into the headings on the page, as well as into emphasized sections (bold or large text). Even though search engines are de-emphasizing descriptive meta-tags, include keywords in them nevertheless. The description meta-tag should have an accurate description of your page, and the keywords meta-tag should contain a set of keywords (separated by commas) that list key concepts mentioned on the page.

This will help you to understand the basics of search engine optimization and it is an important first step in creating an optimized, well-positioned web site.

Patrick Sia is the man behind Income-Internet-Business.com. He's a passionate believer in the power of technology to better the lives of everyone and his passion and drive are hallmarks of his attitude to doing business.

Check out more about him @ http://www.income-internet-business.com/blog and http://www.income-internet-business.com for his step-by-step guide to startup a successful internet business.