In the world of internet marketing, there is no bigger a “buzz” word than SEO. If you have a great website, but people can’t find it, then it is not going to be very effective. We have put together five SEO tips that should help any webmaster to optimize their website, increase rank, and boost traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works when it is done correctly and consistently.

Keyword Research

Before you create any website, you should do thorough keyword research for your topic, product or niche. This is a very important part of SEO and if this is not done effectively, it can affect the effectiveness of all of the other strategies. Keyword research will establish your starting point to locate what search terms that your web visitors will use to find your website.

Keyword Rich URL

After you have found your list of your top keywords, begin to use them on your site. Start off with your domain name or your URL. Take your top keyword and do a search of available domain names. If you find one that is available, take it. You may have to use a version of your keyword, if availability is limited.

Keywords in Title & Meta Description

Your meta tags are another important part of your website. Try to use your keywords in your meta title tag and your meta description. Your meta title tag is the text that shows up at the top of your browser when displaying your website. The meta description is sometimes used by the search engines as a description of your website in search results. There is an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of meta keywords. You should focus on your title and description, and then add meta keywords just to be complete.

Great Content

If visitors are finding your website, coming to your site, and not finding the information they are looking for, they leave. You must provide informative content for your visitors. As they say “Content is King”, and you want to provide information that people can use. Teach someone something that they didn’t know or provide a tutorial on how to do something and your visitors will remember, and will probably return to your website.

Back Links

This is a vast topic and an essential component in SEO. Having a nice mixture of high and low authority sites linking to your website is the most effective and natural strategy. If your content is good, people will most likely link back to your site. There are many strategies, but it comes down to these areas: article marketing, press releases, social bookmarks, forum comments and blog comments. As far as SEO tips, link building can be a full time job. We can’t cover all of the back link strategies involved in this article, but we will cover this more in future articles. The key for back links is to use your keywords as anchor text in your backlinks. Example: your keyword is “hair salon”. Your backlinks would provide information about “hair salon” and then your website backlink would look like this: a href=”url”>Hair Salon . When your visitor clicks on the link, they will be directed to your url, which preferably would be an article on “hair salon”.

Follow these SEO tips to get started with your website campaign and please realize that this is a process. You will learn many things as you go through the process, but the end result will be more traffic to your website.