Raising your website's position on the Search Engines is increasingly important as thousands of new websites are created each day and many may be in competition with yours. The more sites added to the World Wide Web, the more expensive advertising costs will be. Don't get trapped into spending hundreds of dollars per day, per week or per month for advertising.

The purpose of optimizing your website is so that Search Engines can easily search your site, navigate throughout and categorize it. As well as creating a graphically appealing informative site for your visitors, you need to concentrate on building a strong keyword-based theme throughout the site.

Search Engines are large databases of Web sites that are automatically generated. These Internet search engines use a software robot or spider that seeks out and indexes Web sites. Yahoo, Google, MSN, Excite, AltaVista, AskJeeves are some of the popular Search Engines. To produce accurate search results, search engines must keep their ranking algorithms (formulas) secret.

Search engine optimization begins with choosing keywords and key phrases. This is an important first-step and goes hand-in-hand with developing your website theme and choosing a domain name. Before choosing your key phrases, you should check out your competing websites. You cannot optimize your website to reach its highest position without understanding exactly how your competitors websites reached theirs. Your website should have a clear theme. And your keywords must describe the theme of your site, as well as help your website reach the highest results when queried on the search engines. This is so important for two reasons. One, is because Pay-Per-Click Advertising can be extremely costly. Two, is because the majority of the people who are looking for a product or information on the search engines do NOT click on the sponsored ads. Instead, they click on the freely placed non sponsored websites. Your goal should be to reach the top 10-15 placements in the non sponsored websites.

Before choosing a domain name for your website or company, think about the keywords you may be targeting. While you may think you have a great domain name now, it may not include your important keywords in the URL. Sites with the keyword in the domain tend to rank higher than domains without the keywords.

The next step is to gather material for your website and put it all together so it is graphically appealing, not only for site visitors but for search engines as well. This step may take quite a lot of time, and is usually ongoing, as it is important to continually add, edit and update your site. Every piece of text you add to your website should be supporting the site's overall theme.

Now it is of paramount importance to spread the word about your website and create high-quality optimized links to and from your website to help increase your websites page rank.

Holly Mann

Holly Mann is a veteran of the U.S. Army and served as a Journalist and Photographer. She is now an entrepreneur with numerous online businesses.