Making money with your own website requires an important necessity: traffic. You need it. Not just any low quality traffic that you buy from online advertisement businesses, but high quality visitors interested or ready to buy from you. Search engine traffic can offer you this, simply because visitors who find your site have searched for what you are selling. In order to ensure that you do not miss out on this valuable source of traffic, your website must be highly visible to the search engines.

Search engines are extremely vital to many Internet businesses that depend on traffic from them to earn money. You can take advantage of what search engines can offer you by ensuring that your website is visible to the engines. These search engine companies use software known as spiders or search bots. These programs crawl the web and simply record websites that will be indexed into the search engines. There are several easy steps that you can take to avoid common mistakes and problems that will make you invisible to the search bots.

Did you know that search engines ignore images, graphics and videos? That's right, they can only read and index text. So, if your website contains large amounts of pictures and animation with a small amount of text visible, you might as well just unplug your computer from the Internet because the search engines won't find you anyway. Keep in mind too that text imbedded in image files can't be read either. If your not sure if the text in your website is readable, you can look at the source code of your site. If you don't see the text in the HTML code, then guess what? Search bots won't see it either. Text is key. The more text your site has the better off it is. So resist the urge to "pimp your site" with all of those fancy graphics and animation and stick to basic text with fewer graphics. Besides, a colorfully animated site can be an annoyance to many.

The most important text that you should have in your website is your keywords. You must analyze what keywords are relevant to your site and predict which one's people will type in the boxes of the search engines to find you. Keyword analysis is beyond the scope of this article but is something that you should research thoroughly. The most important thing you should know about keywords is where to place them in your website. Your title should contain your best keywords. Search engines base what keywords are the most important for a site by determining it's relevance. The more relevant it is, the higher the rank it is given and the more likely it is to be displayed when someone searches for it. Therefore, it makes sense to put good keywords in the title since it usually describes what a website is all about. The description of your site should also contain your top keywords. As a general rule, the closer a keyword is to the top of the page, the better chance it has to rank well with the search engines. However, you shouldn't ignore putting keywords in the middle or bottom of the page. Search engines also look at how frequent the keywords appear throughout the webpage before determining their relevance. Do not over use keywords. You could be penalized by the search engines if a keyword is repeated several hundred times within a page. Be moderate but consistent when placing your keywords.

Finally, don't waste your money on companies that claim to give your site a top ranking in the big search engines or the ones that will submit your site to thousands of engines saving you time. No one can guarantee you a top listing. Ranking well is determined by factors outside of any companies reach. In reality, you only have to submit your website to a few of the many search engines. A majority of searches done on the Internet come from Google, Yahoo and MSN alone. These are the only search engines you really need to pay attention to.

Why waste your hard earned cash on poor quality traffic that won't give you the sales you need. Search engines can produce much better quality traffic for you. Being highly visible to the search engines is critical to ranking well with them. The better you rank, the more likely it is that people will find your website, and that of course means making more legitimate money online. If you create a highly visible website that the search engines love, then you will benefit from a constant flow of interested visitors. Good luck to you and your success!