By Desmond Mantor

There are three ways for a customer to get to your site. The

customers can type in your website address and directly come

to your site, only if they have your address. Naturally,

this will restrict your customers to the few who know you

already. The second method involves linking to your site

from another website. Though this is a great way of

generating traffic to your site it is subject to the

permission of other sites to let you post a link on their

site. And, unless you have sufficient traffic already coming

to your site, they may not want to be an affiliate. The

final method for a customer is to find your site through a

search engine.

A search engine is a tool that helps surfers to find

websites. Let us say, you type a keyword like tea kettle?

Immediately, the search engine will comb through the web and

find every page with the keyword tea kettle on it, and

present them in a ranked order. In order to enhance your

chances of success, you would want your site to be ranked in

the top ten, because most people don't bother to go beyond

the first page, not to mention the hundreds that follow.

Search engine optimization is one of the most effective

internet marketing tools available. Consider this: if you

get a visitor to your site from a search engine, he is

already interested in your products. While we cannot rule

out the possibility of some high school kid doing an essay

on gift ideas, it is more likely that it is potential

customers wanting to buy a gift basket. Your website simply

has to convert this visit into a sale!

On the flip side, the search engines consider dozens of

factors to rank sites. Google says they have more than a

hundred criteria in their ranking system. Basically, the

search engine has to be convinced that your site contains

the information that the browser is looking for. For this

purpose you need a lot of keyword rich content. If you have

lots of articles with information on tea kettles but you

have not used the keyword tea kettle often enough, you may

lose the battle. Generally, 3-5% keyword density is

considered okay, although it varies from one search engine

to another. So, in a 500 word article, you should use the

keyword tea kettle at least 15 to 25 times. If you use it

more often than that you can be penalized. Apart from

keywords, you can boost your search engine rankings by using

links on your site. This convinces the search engine that

yours is an important site therefore more likely to have

useful information.

Search engine optimization is, without doubt, the most

effective marketing tool provided you use the two strategies

of keyword rich content and lots of links to other sites

relevant to your own. Then you will succeed in improving

your search engine rankings and consequently bring more

customers to your site.

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