In order to help you achieve the type of traffic you need to make your online business a success, we shall look at each of these statements separately and discuss what options are available to enable you to attract the visitors that are essential to your online future. Although there are ways to attract traffic other than through search engine optimization, it is definitely to your benefit if you can secure traffic by means of the free advertising that a high listing in search engines such as Google and Yahoo can provide you with.

There are many ways in which you can make your website as search engine friendly as possible and improve its capacity for traffic generation. Did you notice the mistake I just made there? I mentioned websites in the same sentence as search engine. True search engines look at web pages, not web sites. More on that in a minute. In order to make it easier for me (and you) I am going to apply the name Google whenever I write about ?search engine?, since although Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Ask, etc are important, no one can deny that Google is the biggest search engine.

Not only that, but it was the first true search engine. Yahoo started life off as a web directory, and if your site was not in the Yahoo directory, it would not be listed in a search. Now, however, in addition to being a website directory, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are true web search engines, the same as Google. I will explain the difference later from my website that you can access from the link in my Resource Box.

For the moment, accept the fact that Google and the other true search engines crawl the whole World Wide Web for the web pages that are most relevant to the search term that your customers are using to find the information they are seeking. Did you notice what I just wrote there? ?Web pages?? Not ?web sites? but web pages, as I mentioned earlier. Google and the rest list individual web pages in order of relevance to its interpretation of the words that your potential visitors use to find their information. That is very important to keep in mind.

How do they do that? How do the search engines decide what is relevant and what is not to a character string ? that is all that your search term is. That is another story really, but it is connected with what is commonly termed ?Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)?, a misnomer for a mathematical statistical analysis of the vocabulary on each of your web pages.

I say misnomer, because LSI is not an indexing technique, but an analysis method that uses character strings and known juxtaposition of characters, to determine what you are writing about through the use of contextual relevance of the whole passage of your text to the keyword, or theme, that you have highlighted by means of the search engine optimization techniques available to you. Nobody can make a web page LSI compliant, or ?use? LSI on a website.

It is akin to saying that you can use probability equations to write an article on fly fishing. It is a nonsense that even the best known internet gurus believe, unless they are lying to us and I sure that they would not do that. They must therefore be more ignorant than we believed them to be, which explains quite a lot all things considered. Which of the two options would they admit to I wonder.

You no longer need the oft-quoted 1% - 3% keyword density on your web page, but instead more vocabulary and content on your page that makes the topic of that page clear, without any doubt, to software that parses our page for its meaning in additional to human readers who can tell that at a glance. You have to use more vocabulary than just repeat the keyword or Google and the rest of the search engines will not list your page.

The most affordable SEO services will provide you with the small things that you do to your individual web pages to improve your listing position and traffic generation capability. Such services need not be expensive, although the sites you find online that offer them tend to charge high prices since they are targeting large companies rather than individuals with single small websites of a hundred pages or less. One technique that they all mention, however, is the use of meta tags. Many get it wrong!

The only important meta tags are the Title and Description tags. You should also point out to the spiders what your more important vocabulary is by use of H tags, bold text, italics and underlining. Google appreciates that, but while you might be rewarded for doing so, you will not be punished for not doing so. There is a massive difference between breaking the rules and failing to give a helping hand.

Your linking strategy is of critical importance, and you must have a good number of links back to your web page from other relevant web pages. Take note of the two important words I have used there: ?pages? and ?relevant?. I could write 10 pages on Google PageRank without doing it justice, so won't start now. Just believe me that you get a share of the Google PageRank of a page linking to yours (not of the home page of that site), and since most linking pages are designed only to hold URL links and consequently contain masses of other links on them, then your share is practically zilch.

Do not therefore give a website a link from your home page that reciprocates with one from deep inside the directory structure that provides you with absolutely no benefit. You cannot lose PageRank by providing a link, but why should you give more than you get. Come to an arrangement: you will provide a link from your PR 5 page if the other party reciprocates. Not if their link is from a PR 0 page.

There are many more ways in which you can legally attract search engines to your website and achieve high listings and to generate loads of traffic. There are also many illegal methods of doing so. It is the end result that counts, but before you can even begin to understand what the term ?black hat? means, you must first understand what SEO means!

Traffic generation is critical to your success, and if you can find affordable SEO services to help you to achieve that, then you are most of the way there. The effect that good search engine optimization has on the generation of traffic to selected pages within your website cannot be over-estimated and will likely determine your future over the next year.