Starting an Online Home Business –
Search Engine Optimization

The purpose of SEO sites is to optimize your web site to be friendlier to search engines. Why does this matter?, it actually matters a lot that your site is search engine friendly due to the fact that your site will be listed somewhere in the search results of the various search engines. If you site is not search friendly, your site will be buried way down in the results and never be seen by potential customers.

The tough thing about search engine optimization is that the search engines are constantly changing some of the rules for what can make a site friendly. Though this is true, there still are some hard and fast rules that do not change.

Here are some things that will help make your site friendly to the search engines:

When designing your web site, make sure you include the keywords you want the search engine to pickup are included in the Title Tag. Your title can read, “How to Start a Herb Garden Business in a Day”. The keywords here being; Herb – Garden – Business.

Next, your description, which search engines use to describe your page, will expand on your title. Your description will say, “We show you how to start a herb garden business in a day by providing a free workbook and template to follow”.

Your web site should also contain some rich content. Content is considered rich when it is full of good information that visitors to your site can use. More and more content should be added to the site on a periodic basis. You can add content by writing your own articles or by adding, a RSS feed to your site that contains other writers articles. To see find free content you can visit, www.ezinearticles.com, www.ideamarketers.com, or www.goarticles.com.

Earlier in the chapter on Search Engine Optimization, I mentioned that the search engine rules change constantly, when it comes to linking with other sites this has been the case. Previously search engines liked seeing your site with numerous links to other sites. Web site owners knowing this began exchanging links with one another. Over time, programs were built that swapped links between web sites, hundreds at a time. This caused a real problem for the search engines as they now had sites ranking high when they only got there due to some trickery and not by the popularity of the site. The original intent of the link exchange idea was that web sites would exchange links with those sites that were most useful to their visitors. This of course did not necessarily happen and now the linking rule has changed.

The new rule for linking and making your site friendly with the search engines is to have numerous one-way links. This rule now gets back to the popularity of the web site. How many web sites do you think will be willing to exchange a link with you, but not expect anything in return, not many? So how do you get web sites to link to you without you having to link back to them? The long term strategy is to have a great web site that has valuable content and insight that others will have to link to you or risk being left out. The short-term strategy is to write unique and topical articles and submit them to article web sites that will then make your article available to other web sites free of charge. You are not paid directly for your articles, but you get a link back to your site and when someone reads your article, they can be directed back to your site by the credit that is given at the bottom of each article.

Peter Engelbrecht is President of Diagonal Street Business Services and operates the web site
http://www.BestBusinesses4u.com The site provides stay at home moms and dads with practical home-based business ideas.