by Jim Pretin, 6/10/2006

If you've just started your very first website, be it a small business, or a simple content site, you have probably encountered the phrase "search engine optimization." Search engine optimization and getting to the top of the search engines presents a dilemma for most new websites. Herein lies some information about the challenge of search engine optimization and some useful tips for webmasters.

Traffic for most websites is feast or famine because most traffic is directed to a website by way of a search engine. If you're on the first two pages of a search engine for your target keyword, you'll likely get tons of traffic. If you're on page 3 or worse, traffic might be sparse. Getting on the first two pages of the search listings can be the difference between receiving hundreds of thousands of hits per day or receiving a couple thousand hits per day. So, how can you optimize your website and increase your ranking?

There are many important factors for getting the best possible position on a search engine, the most rudimentary of which is that your web pages be "optimized." In other words, you need to make sure that your web page contains the keyword that you want to be ranked for. If your website is about frogs, for example, and you want people searching for "frogs" on Google to find your website in the top position, then your website needs to have the word "frogs" appear more than once or twice. If your pages don't have at least some significant content containing the word "frogs", then the search engines will not deem your website relevant for information about frogs, and you won't receive a decent ranking for that particular keyword. To optimize your webpages, you must also have META tags (META tags are tags that you must include in your HTML so that search engine crawlers can get a quick gist of what your website is about before scanning the rest of your page).