To sell your products and services online, you need targeted traffic. Search engines will send you targeted traffic, and a lot of it, if you take certain steps.

The first step in your search engine marketing campaign isn't search engine optimization. Your first step is to understand the internet and how to effectively use it to promote your products and services.

The internet is a content driven medium. Searchers are looking for information. They don't want to be sold to. They want value. You can provide this value through the content you write for your website, as well as content you write for your promotions.

Therefore, you need to develop a complete, content management strategy. Your content management strategy needs to be customer focused, content driven, and optimized for the search engines.

Your content management strategy should consider on page and off page optimization factors. On page factors include optimizing your page for keywords relevant to your page, titles, and descriptions. Off page factors include link exchanges and backlinks.

Once you've chosen the topic for your site, you need to develop your website. Decide what content you will write. Your content should include articles, press releases, and product reviews. You can also create free ebooks, reports, and white papers provided the information you include will be useful to your site visitor.

Before developing your content, you need to do your research. Find out what your readers are searching for. There are plenty of free tools and software on the internet to help you accomplish this task. Simply search for a keyword phrase like "keyword suggestion tools".

When you're ready to write your content, choose two to three keywords and/or keyword phrases in the text for your page. Write your content and then optimize your page for these keywords. You can use free software like Web CEO.

Although on page optimization will help you if you don't have a lot of competition for your keyword phrases, it is not enough if you are targeting high competition words. To raise your rankings, you will need to link to high traffic sites with high page rank. Building backlinks from other websites will also help you raise your rankings.

Do a search in your favorite search engine to find sites you can link to. Study these sites. Check to see what keywords they use to optimize their pages. Find out if they exchange links and request a link exchange.

The key to success in search engine marketing is to do your homework BEFORE you create your website. The bottom line is that no matter how many links you have pointing back to your site, or how well you optimize your page for the search engines, you won't rank high for keywords that are too competitive.

If you still insist on building a website on a highly competitive topic, then I would recommend you use other techniques to promote your site. Article writing, forum posting, press releases, pay per click ads, and offline classifieds.

The bottom line is you won't succeed in any business you aren't passionate about. Choose a topic you like that has a market and then build a content rich search engine friendly market. Get your name out there and keep branding yourself. You will succeed.