Getting an advantage in the competitive online marketplace can be quite challenging. Once online marketers start to see some success, some have a tendency to put their head down and focus solely on the business at hand. This can lead to missing some of the other opportunities to gain business, like using SEO.

The most successful webmasters have some understanding of SEO and how it affects their websites. There are many myths about SEO and what it is, but even if you have never heard the term it can be easy to apply and benefit from SEO.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website from a technical and stylistic viewpoint. The technical optimization takes the form of using the proper Meta Tags, Alt Image Tags, and off-page optimization techniques. the style changes are made to make the content more friendly to the search engines, bold, title, highlighting keywords help the search engines deliver more accurate results.

The natural outcome of optimizing a site is increased traffic from search engines, and ranking higher in the results that are delivered to their users.

SEO won't necessarily change the look of your site. Although, sometimes it is a good idea to make structural changes to a site to make it easier for the search engine to read the page. Many times some subtle changes in your headings, focusing on your keywords in text, adding content can make a big difference in your overall SEO.

Depending on how competitive your chosen keywords are, you can expect to see results from your SEO efforts fairly quickly, sometimes in just a few days. However, when you are starting your SEO effort you should start with some broader, less competitive keyword terms and work up to more competitive ones. This way you can get the momentum going and gain PageRank to compete in the more competitive terms as you move up in the search results.

Tracking your website statistics is the best way to track your SEO and know if your SEO efforts are bringing the desired results. Most hosting sites offer basic statistics for this, or check out Google Analytics.

When you are analyzing this data, pay attention to where your traffic is coming from. If you see increasing referrals from Google, MSN, Yahoo or another search engine, then your efforts are working. Next you should watch where your traffic is coming from geographically. If you only ship to The US, you wouldn't want to attract visitors from Australia. If you sell globally, then you will be able to determine where you product is hot.

If you are using other advertising methods like pay per click, or Banner Ads, direct them to special landing pages so you don't skew your results with traffic from paid advertising.

SEO is the best way to drive highly targeted, traffic to your site and best of all it can be free. The increased traffic and sales that come from incorporating SEO into your marketing and advertising make it well worth the effort.