Though the topic of "search engine optimization" deserves a lot of discussion, today I just want to touch on a few points. Anyone can slap together a website, but few can get a website to rank high in the search engines. Contrary to popular belief, just having a website is not enough to successfully market your product or service. Many a business owner thinks that having a website and getting it indexed by the search engines will bring them all the visitors they need to make money online. When it comes to SEO, there is no set it and forget it button. Many website owners believe this common misconception. To rank well in the SERPs (search engine results page) and to stay ranked well, will require continued effort. I would like to highlight three key factors that will bring a website to the top of the SERPs and to keep it there.

Every website owner should know by now that good content is number one on anybody's list; especially the search engines. It only stands to reason that, if you don't have the content that people are searching for, your website would be of very little use. Part of your content is your keywords. Or your keywords are part of your content. Either way just having keywords in your meta tags, is not enough. The more keywords, within reason, you have in your content the better. Search engines like good keyword density. Keep in mind, however that your content still needs to be readable to your human visitors. That being said, beware of keyword stuffing. Part of maintaining your position in the SERPs is updating your content every so often. It's all about pleasing the search engines. Don't let your content get stale.

The second most important factor in SEO, is link building. It is commonly said that the search engines view a back link as a vote for a website's content. The more quality sites you have pointing back to your site, the better your site looks to the search engines, thus improving it's pagerank (PR). PR is based on a scale of 0-10 or unranked. There are many ways to acquire back links, but I'll only list a few. You can post on forums or comment on blogs, while leaving your link in the signature line. Be sure to make useful, relevant posts so you are not accused of link spamming. Writing articles can be useful in creating back links as well. Most article directories will allow you to leave a link in the bio box. You can also exchange links with other sites in your niche. Though frowned upon, you can also buy links. Just be sure not to buy too many at once because the search engines will penalize your website if out of nowhere you have thousands of sites pointing to yours.

The third most important, and often overlooked aspect of SEO is website design and structure. The first thing about design is that you want as much of your important content to be above the fold and in the line of sight of the visitor. You don't want a visitor to have to scroll way down to the bottom of the page to find out what your site has to offer. You also need to provide direction, do this, click this etc. Whether they know it or not people like to be given direction. When I say structure, I am referring to the internal link structure of your site. Try to avoid having dynamic pages. In other words, pages with URLs that contain http get variables. Search engines have a hard time spidering these types of pages. If you can use relevant keywords in your URL files, not only will this help the search engines spider your whole site, it will increase your keyword density as well. Always register your sitemap with Google and also with Yahoo and MSN if possible so they know what to index. I said earlier that your content should be updated from time to time. However try not to change your website's structure if possible. It can take a while before the search engines will reindex your updated pages. One way to avoid this is by not using a product as your page title. If you do, you strap yourself to always promoting that product, which limits you if markets change.

In summary, SEO is an on going effort. Exposure is key to your internet marketing success, and without SEO you will severely limit your website's exposure.