When you set up a shop you need customers to be successful. Every person that walks in through your door is a potential customer. The more traffic you have through that door the more chance you have of making sales. On the internet it is the same. To get that traffic to your site you either advertise using PPC and or optimize your site to get search engine traffic.

Seeing as how a lot of your business will come through the search engines you need to make sure that you are listed in the top 10 or 20; Basically the first two pages. Here are some of the things you must do:

The importance of the right keywords

What keywords to use, that is the question. You need to look for keywords that have a good number of searches each month and not too much competition. Too much competition will make it impossible to achieve your goal of achieving the top 10 listing in the search engine results.

Choose long tail keywords (a key phrase of 3 - 5 words)that have a reasonable search frequency for your industry. For example “Internet Marketing”: it has a very large search frequency. It also has huge competition. Your chances of getting your site into the top 10 of Google would be virtually nil.

Here’s how to optimize your site

One of the most important things you need to do in optimizing your sites pages is the title tag. This tag plays one of the most important roles in Google search results. This is what Google usually uses for each of its listings.

In setting up this tag, you need to use the keyword phrase that your research has helped you to choose. It is best to have this phrase come up early in your title tag. If you can use it twice in the tag, do so. You MUST use it at least once in this tag.

Another thing that is important is that you have a unique new tag for each page of your site optimized with your keyword phrase.

Using an XML Sitemap can be helpful. It does not directly impact on your search rankings but it will help Google more quickly see changes in your site.

It is important to use Robots.txt. This is the first file the robot will look for each time they visit your site. Having this file will reduce 404 errors appearing in your log file.

There are many more thing that can and should be done to optimize your site for the search engines. These few pointers will be helpful in getting your site listed in the top 10. We will deal with other things in a future article.