Do you use pay per click advertising methods to promote your home based business? Did you know that the search engines can provide a lot of that traffic for free? Have you heard of search engine optimization or S.E.O.? It scares many people who do not consider themselves computer geeks but to optimize your website for search engine traffic requires only a few simple steps and concepts to achieve.

A search engine uses a robot to crawl your site and read its contents. If the robot can crawl the site in entirety the search engine has more information available about your business. By incorporating a few items into your HTML the robot will read and pass your site information to the search engine. Steps to achieve this is are as follows:

There are discussions as to whether the major search engines use them but I have found my site descriptions written into my html appearing on Google. The basic setup in the html that has produced search engine traffic for me is:

(Each item should be inside <>.)

1. head
2. title "Your Site Title" /title
3. meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
4. meta name="description" content="Your Site Description "
5. meta name="keyword" content="Your Keyword, Your Keyword"
6. /head

• The Website Title: is included in the head of the of your html. Your title should not have what are referred to as "stop" words. Examples are "the", of", "your", "and" and any symbols that represent them for example, "&." Robots stop when they reach these type of words and can exit your site right then not collecting your site information.
• The Meta Description: is included in the head of your html. This is a basic "one liner" about your sites content. This ad within your html needs to say what your site is offering and how your product or service will benefit the viewer.
• The Meta Keywords: is included in the head of your html. These are your keywords. The best keywords are not normally the most common keywords. Specific phrases of 3-4 words related to your topic are typically best. For example if your site is selling furniture, the keyword "furniture" will not describe what kind of furniture you are selling and will generally get more browsers vs buyers from the search engines. A keyword like "antique maple canopy bed" would be picked up in a search of specific items wanted and produce more buyers vs browsers.

Once you have the head of the html in place, write the body of text. The theme you have chosen for your site should carry throughout all the pages of your site and be rich with keywords from the Meta Keywords Tag. The search engines use keyword density (how often a keyword or phrase occurs) and keyword weight (how prominent it is in relation to total words on a page) to determine keyword importance within the body. Underlining or having your keyword or phrase in bold also increases the weight of your keyword or phrase. All the pages on your site should be linked together. The robot must be able to read all pages in order to gather information about your site for the search engines to produce search engine traffic to your site. Generally a menu on the top or bottom of each page connecting one page to another allows the robot to "spider" your website. Broken links both internal and external can stop a robot from crawling your site. Make sure that all your links are valid.

This is a basic setup that I use on all pages of my websites in order to allow the robots to read my sites and produce free search engine traffic to my home based business. Search Engine Optimization produces results for your home based business 24/7 because it relies only on user searches. With your website optimized to accommodate those searches your business prospers. There are tools available to assist you in search engine optimization that add many more methods to increase both your traffic and page rank using the search engines.

I hope you have found these tips to be helpful. For more information on Search Engine Optimization and Keywords please visit the IOC-Home Based Business Information Center. I have been online since January 2007, relatively new, but devoting much time to researching programming and setup of a home based business. In addition to website setup, I have done considerable research into home based business opportunities that will build wealth over time and are not just quick money scams and ways to advertise your home based business for free. These can all be viewed at IOC-Home Based Business Information Center. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Patricia_Lemieux-Lewis