It is amazing how many Internet business owners do not practice basic search engine optimization. If you knew how much traffic your website could get from search engines you would probably work harder at optimizing it for the proper keywords.

In this article we will talk about a few of the basics any serious Internet business should be following.

1. One mistake people make is they think they need to start from ground zero and either get a new website or totally overhaul their existing one. In reality there are probably many good things about your existing website and some of the pages may have already been spidered by search engines.

For this reason you want to employ a few of the other tips we will talk about with your existing site and not make major changes to it.

2. Define your target audience!Many websites are scattered and appear to have no focus to them. Defining your target audience means knowing exactly who you are aiming at when a person sits down and begins to search keywords on their favorite search engine.

3. Another thing to consider is how fun your website is. When you get visitors to it you want them to stay and browse around on additional pages. Adding graphics, banners, video, audio, polls and so on make it more intereactive which makes it more fun.

4. Target keyword phrases and longtail keyword phrases. If they have less competition you stand a better chance of ranking high for your keyword phrases. Longtail keyword phrases of four, five, or even more words are easier for you to get on page 1 of a search engine for.

These phrases may not bring you as much traffic as the shorter phrases, but over time if you target enough of them you can develop meaningful quality traffic using this strategy. You can build your keyword list by starting at the free keyword search tool here: adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

5. Make sure your site is set up targeting specific keyword phrases with hyperlinks that your visitors can click on. For this reason you may not want to post affiliate links on your homepage. Before passing them through to an affiliate page always send your visitors to a blog post or an additional page of your own website.

6. Another thing you should do is develop webpages and blog posts around the keyword phrases your are building. Include those in the title as well as in the body of any at text you’re posting on the page. Simply put you are trying to let the search engines know what that page is about so they can rank you well for those specific words.