The Internet, your number one home business source for marketing, is made up of hundreds of millions of Web pages at this point. Most consumers, in order to find the pages on the topics they need turn to search engines. These search engines are designed to help consumers find their way to other relevant sites.

While each search engine has its own way of working, there are three key tasks that all perform. Whether the search engine is MSN, Google, Ask.Com, Yahoo or one of the myriad of other search engines out there, it searches the Internet based on various key words. It then keeps its own index of the words that it finds and where it has found them. The third common activity of these search engines is to allow any consumer to search through these words or word combinations that are stored in the search engine's index.

When the first search engines were introduced, and before home business and its Internet and affiliate marketing was as prominent as they are today, a search engine might have to handle as many as two thousand consumer inquiries daily. Now the top 10 search engines typically each have an index that holds many hundreds of millions of Web pages. Each must respond to several million daily search queries.

What's important here, to the new home business owner who needs to accomplish some productive Internet marketing, is that her or his business Web site is found often and easily and towards the top of the returns on these search engines when a consumer conducts a query. Search engine optimization and smart affiliate marketing are the tools to make this happen.

There are two key elements to a home business Web site being found on a major search engine. The Internet marketing ploy here is two-pronged. The home business owner must choose the right key words to place on the site, and those words must be located in the right place on the page. Important places for important words are titles, subtitles and the first paragraph of the landing page.

To understand home business Internet marketing through search engine optimization you must understand meta tags.

What these helpful little Internet marketing buddies do is let the page owner specify chosen key concepts and words under which he or she wants the page and site to be indexed. The best way this helps the home business? Internet marketing strategy is by clarifying words for which there are multiple meanings. The problem with meta tags, and one which a good search engine spider will resolve, is that an unscrupulous, fraudulent or careless site owner can place meta tags of popular keywords to bring consumers to his or her site when the site has little if anything to do with the keyword.

Obviously nothing is perfect or fraud-free, but SEO is still one of the best means for Internet marketing and affiliate marketing your home business.