If you intend to start an online business from scratch the most important thing you need to do first is optimize your website. This gives you the advantage of getting free organic traffic from the search engines and saves you a lot of time marketing your site later on.

The process of optimizing your site is referred to as SEO, meaning search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a complete business in itself and it is a popular acronym used among part time and full time marketers and is wildly used in seminars and conventions.

The main index page of your home online business site is where you need to start with the optimization process. For example, Jane has an online home business. She has a website that provides a free internet marketing training newsletter and offers her target market an eBook on how to attract targeted traffic to your website. So to attract more hot prospects her goal is to appear in the top rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

As Jane's business has been online for 2 years already, she is aware that by achieving high search engine rankings will result in long term consistent free organic traffic. Jane needs to start off by doing proper keyword research. She can utilize the services offered by WordTracker or Google's Keyword Tool, to find the right keywords to optimize her site, resulting in her online business site ranking higher in the search engines.

Jane realizes that the more the keyword is targeted, the more success she will have in attracting hot prospects. From her past successful experiences and initial studies of SEO, she also knows that the fewer amount of competitors there are actively competing on the market, the more chances she will have on succeeding rapidly on acquiring free traffic and hot prospects.

She makes sure the keywords she selected from her last keyword research have a low amount of competitors but the highest return on investment for her chosen market. The keyword phrase selected contained words with high traffic demand; however, they were wrapped with other words that contain fewer amounts of competitors in order to rank higher on the search engines in a faster way.

Jane is aware that keyword selection is highly important to acquire results once again. Can you guess what she ended up doing? She added long tail keywords, usually of four to five words in the title tags, H1 tags, in her description, in her keyword tags and sprinkled in the body of the web page in order to have spiders find her website faster and rank it according to its new popularity. Also by constantly adding unique content to her website ensures that the search engine spiders return on a regular basis.

On-site or Internal search engine optimization is just one of the hundreds of factors you can actually do to make your home online business more profitable and successful. The knowledge, experience and skills you have acquired will help you start your home business online correctly. It does not matter which of these three characteristics you have, you don't need to be highly intelligent to do the basic SEO steps to optimize your website.