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.

About The Author

Desmond Mantor is the Director of Sales and Marketing for Have Traffic a company specializing in delivering highly targeted traffic for commercial web sites, proven to convert to sales at higher rates in comparison to regular major pay per click sources. Please visit http://www.havetraffic.com for further details.