You are in business to earn revenue and your website's goal is to assist in this process. The goal of your website is first and foremost to bring in traffic, and there are numerous ways to do this. In this series, I will cover a few concepts that will help you effectively achieve this goal. In this article I will cover the topics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and website popularity.

Search Engine Optimization is just that - optimizing a website and its pages for better readability by search engines. SEO is mandatory. It's the logical first step in being found by potential visitors. The goal is to improve a website's positioning within the search engines results listing.

At scheduled intervals, search engines 'crawl' the web searching for domains, websites and their pages, and any linked pages. The result of these crawls is indexed within an enormous database which search engines reference when web searches are performed. Search engines use algorithms to determine how websites outrank each other and climb to the top of the (much coveted) search query results list. A number of factors come into play when determining page ranking.

The most obvious factor is the page relevance. I'm talking here about the search engine's search criteria vs. website page content. The importance of ensuring relevant page content is extremely high. It's quite simple, without the correct page content a website will not be found. The steps to creating the 'correct' content are not difficult, but they require some thought. Which words do you think potential visitors would likely key into a search engine? Create a list of these words. Prioritize this list, with the most common search terms at the top. Check this list against your site's content, verifying that the high priority keywords are found in your content with the most frequency. Besides the readable content, there are other areas of your pages where you will want to inject these keywords. This includes the title and description Meta tags, image alt tags, and heading tags. However, you must use caution when adding keywords to your pages. 'Stuffing' the pages with keywords can be detected by search engines as they read through your site. Pages that are obviously stuffed are penalized. Use moderation. If the page is readable and logical when read by a person you should be good to go. 'Keyword density' checking tools are freely available on the Internet which may assist in this analysis.

A second and arguably more important factor is web site/page popularity. Search engines establish website popularity based on how frequently they are referenced by other websites. As other websites link to yours, as a reference for information, your website becomes more popular. This effect is magnified when a more popular site than yours links to your website. To create these 'inbound' links to your website you must begin to spread the word. Like handing out a business card at a conference, you must become active on the Internet and post links to your website wherever possible. Some areas where you might post links are in email signatures and discussion forums. You may also want to submit company news to sites such as PRWeb.com, PRNewswire.com, Digg.com and Netscape.com. Another option may be to write (or hire a writer to write) articles about topics related to your business, which include a link back to your website. These articles can be posted on news sites or in article repositories.

Increasing traffic to your website may be achieved by following the aforementioned steps. Make your website attractive to search engines by carefully selecting the web pages' content, and create inbound links from other sites. Traffic will increase and earnings are sure to follow.