SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important part of getting good placement on search engines. You need incoming links, and a pay-per-click program helps tremendously, but in the long run, good optimization will save you tens of thousands in advertising. There are hundreds of companies offering SEO services. Some are better than others, but what is critical is for you to understand what goes into SEO, so its not such a mystery.

A site will not show up well on search engines unless its optimized. There are various components that are involved in optimizing.

1. Site structures / internal link structures
2. Keyword frequency on various pages
3. Content quantity

Create a few dozen pages for your keywords
Every page on your site links to the home page and the other pages on the navigation bar. Those pages on the navigation bar should be your most critical pages for your most critical search terms. Any keyword that gets you more than 2% of your incoming traffic is a medium to large keyword for practical purposes, and should have a page dedicated to it. This means that you need to have a few dozen carefully optimized pages to account for all of your major keywords. You need to moniter these pages and see if they get good placement, and you need to refine them if they are lagging behind on their placement.

How to do search engine optimization for particular pages.
Lets say that on a particular page, you want to emphasize "Long Widgets". A good SEO consultant will instruct you to put the term "Long Widgets" in the:

1. Metatitle
2. Metadescription
3. Header
4. And in the text of the page concerned
5. incoming and outgoing links
6. The pages that the incoming and outgoing links go to need the term too.
7. Page length should be roughly 300-380 words in the BODY of the page. This doesn't include navigation bars, mastheads, and other template content.

Search term variations
If you have a page linked to your long widgets page that has the term long orange widgets, it will take ten instances of that different term variation to equal the credit of one exact search term match in terms of link benefits. If you have exact terms on pages linking in, and on links themselves, then you will get dramatically better placements on those exact terms. Here is another example. If your page is for "Long widgets", and the link coming in says, "Very long widgets", that link is about 60% as good for optimiztion as an exact match, but "Long Orange Widgets" gets only 10%. An exact match plus a word only dilutes its effectiveness, but a broken match or incomplete match really cuts down its power. Its complicated.

Please read more at our search engine optimization part 2 page.