In any business the most important thing is traffic. In a bricks and mortar shop it is traffic through the door that brings the sales. Each person that walks through the door is a potential customer. It is no different on the internet. Your site is found because a search engine sent them through their search or you have drawn them through other advertising.

In order to get the traffic you require to run a successful internet business, you need search engine traffic. To get this traffic you need to be listed in the first 20 listings. The first 10 really needs to be your goal. This is the first 2 pages; Here are some thing you need to do.

Choose The Right Keywords

What keywords to use, that is the question. You need to look for keywords that have a good number of searches each month and not too much competition. Too much competition will make it impossible to achieve your goal of achieving the top 10 listing in the search engine results.

Look for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are keyword phrases of from 3 - 5 words. In your research you will need to look at how many searches are made on that phrase as you will need to have a reasonable amount of searches. You also need to note how much competition that phrase has. If there are too many trying for that phrase it will be better to choose another; One that you can get to the top 10.

What you need to do to optimize your site.

The title tag on you page is the most important tag. This is what Google uses for its listings. This tag is very important in Google's listings.

The keyword phrase that your research has shown is the best to use should appear near the start of the tag and if possible again later in the tag. It MUST be used at least once in your title tag.

It is also important to have a unique title tag for each page.

Another thing that can help is having an XML Sitemap. This won't help your rankings but it will help Google index your site changes more quickly.

To eliminate or reduce 404 errors a robots.txt file is useful as well. This is the first file the search engine will look for when it visits your site to index it.

These are just a few of the thing you can and should do to help your page rankings and thus your listing position in the search engines. There are a lot of other thing you can do but they will have to be the subject of another article.