1) Keywords: This is the core of all SEO marketing. Search engines are based on an index of keywords that web crawlers use to identify the relevance of sites based on search engine inquiries. The more relevant, specific, and unique your keywords are, the better your chances of performing highly in a search engine inquiry. Free tools, like Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker, can help you if this is difficult, which it probably will be in the beginning.

2) Titles: Along with keywords, a unique and catchy title will surely attract many curious visitors to the content on your site. The more enticing and interesting your title the better the chances are that visitors will return for more later.

3) Backlinks: This is the most technical aspect of SEO marketing. Backlinking entails links that you have embedded into an article that you posted on a third party site that will direct a visitor back to your site. The more backlinks you post on quality, highly-visible sites, the more likely your traffic will increase from referrals. When your links are clicked from these third-party sources, web crawlers recognize this as an increase in your popularity, which boosts your optimization rating.

4) Directories: You can easily and quickly submit your site to a variety of web directories, like Google and Yahoo. All you have to do is go to each particular search engine and fill out the form they supply for web site directory submission. This will automatically add your site and the related links to the web crawler index, which will update your score every time it searches the web.

Once you optimize your website for images, your site will appear in image search results and pick up new visitors and potential customers. Optimizing your site for images isn’t instantaneous and will require some time and effort, but it’s worth it. Here are some ways to do it.

Ask yourself, “How can we use images on our website?” What kind of images “go” with your website? You want your traffic to be targeted, so you have to put some thought into it. That means that unless you’re in the bikini business, pictures of women in bikinis may get you traffic, but there would only be a random chance that any of those visits would result in sales.

Once you have an idea, you have to get an image that you can use legally. There are several ways to do this. You can create them yourself if you’re a decent photographer who is reasonably well-versed in PhotoShop. If you do this, you need to add a watermark or some other indication that the rights to the picture belong to you. Image theft happens all the time, and you certainly don’t want your picture selling your competitor’s product.

Another way to get an image for your website is to hire a freelancer to do it. You can also find large databases of free images on the web, and of course, you can buy them from a stock photography site.

Once you have an image or images, you can optimize them for image search. Start by dealing with the alt tags. When you hover your mouse over an image, the text you see is the alt tag, and it increases keyword density in the eyes of the search bots. They help the engine crawlers determine the relevance of the image. Additionally, the alt tag is what will show when users have the pictures disabled in their browser. Use your targeted keywords in your alt tags, but you don’t have to waste them on words like picture, image, etc. because they’re usually already attributed to the search query.

If you are able, include the file name with your keywords, as long as they make sense. It is better to use hyphens rather than underscores to separate words. You should also avoid duplicating images. Say you have the same image, only in several sizes: you don’t want all of them to get indexed. What you can do is deny search robots access to the ones you don’t want indexed.

Finally, build links to the pages where the images are. One good way to do that is to submit your page to a social bookmarking site like Digg. All the extra back links you get will eventually add up to a healthy search engine ranking.

Good search engine optimization is an advertising campaign in itself almost. The higher your website ranks on search engines, the more traffic you’ll get, so you want a website that is search engine friendly. But before you worry about SEO, make sure you have a well designed site. You want your business to reflect your site and your business philosophy. You want your site to be interesting, unique, and (this is extremely important) easy to navigate. If your visitors risk going deep into the pages of your site with no clear way back out, they’ll be frustrated. Maybe so frustrated that they don’t want to shop there. A well-designed website is a great investment that will probably quickly pay for itself in increased visitor numbers and sales.

The logical placement of your web pages is an important part of search engine optimization. The “deep” pages of your site can hurt or help your search engine standings. If you can get back links to pages other than the home page, that will help tremendously. These are known as deep links and are highly regarded by search engines. The logic is, “If people are linking to his page that’s only about extended wear contact lenses, they must really like the home page.” Make your site easy to shop at and put good content on all the pages. A user-friendly site is a well ranked site.

Have a reliable web hosting company. Not only should they give you plenty of disk space and bandwidth, plus extras like a bunch of email accounts, they should guarantee uptime of better than 99.5%. Nobody can guarantee you 100% uptime, because things break and tornadoes go through, and there’s no way to keep the servers absolutely safe. But they can come really close. Remember, on the Internet, there’s no such thing as opening and closing hours. Even if your site is only down for an hour or two, if you’re getting thousands of hits a day, that means that a bunch of them weren’t able to use your site and consequently, weren’t able to buy any of your products or services. Fortunately, good, affordable web hosting is more available than ever. There are enough hosting companies that they all want to do something to set themselves above the others. Reliability and real 24/7/365 technical help are extremely important qualities for your web hosting company to have.

Your website is as important to your business as your advertising campaign, so you want to have the best site you can afford. Your business’s website should be attractive, easy to navigate, and friendly to the major search engines. Search engine optimization is a function of having a reliable, navigable site that is keyword rich with excellent content.