Like most things worthwhile, search engine optimization requires at least a modest investment in time to be truly successful. Fortunately, it's an investment that rewards you handsomely when you know the steps to doing it right.

Search engine optimization offers a higher return on investment (ROI) than most, if not all other forms of online advertising. Countless studies have placed search engine marketing at the top of the "most effective forms of online marketing" list.

After all, what lead could be more targeted, and more ready to make a purchase than one that is specifically searching for what you have to offer? Most other types of advertising are passive, hoping to catch the curiosity of a potential buyer at just the right moment. Conversely, searching is active. The prospect is pro-actively looking for a product, service, or information.

With billions of searches being conducted daily, how does an online business tap into this incredible market potential? You must appear near the top of the results for search keywords that apply to your business. That means the search engine must find your Web site's content more relevant to a given search than the millions of other pages in its index.

Simply submitting your site and then hoping for the best is not an effective strategy. Instead, you must understand the process to achieving top rankings in the major search engines, and then do something about it. To industry insiders, this process is known as search engine optimization or SEO. Generating free traffic for your Web site via search engine optimization requires the following seven steps:

Generating free traffic for your Web site via search engine optimization requires the following seven steps:

1. Keyword Selection - Perhaps more often overlooked than any step in search engine optimization, choosing the right keywords and phrases for which to optimize is crucial. If you choose keywords that few people are searching for, then you can achieve a dozen top rankings and yet nobody will show up at your site.

Just as bad, choose keywords that are too competitive and you'll soon throw your hands up in frustration trying to rise to the top.

Furthermore, if you choose keywords that are not closely related to the type of buyer you cater to, then visitors will arrive at your site but never make a purchase.

The solution? Simply make a list of relevant keywords that balance both popularity and competition. WordTracker is the best-known service for helping you do this quickly and easily. It brainstorms keywords in seconds and then helps you narrow that list by ordering them based on both popularity and competition factors.

2. Measure your rankings - Before you can improve your positions, you must know where you rank for the keywords and phrases that relate to your business's products and services. If you did your job in step 1, you should now have a long list of highly relevant keywords and phrases that people are searching on.
3. Page Creation and Optimization - This is the heart and soul of search engine marketing. If you don't know what the search engines are looking for when they rank pages, then you can choose the best keywords and rank check all day long and never get anywhere. This is the part that makes all the difference in your ability to compete effectively.

What is Web page optimization? Simply put, your goal is to give the search engine what it wants to see. The easiest way to determine what its looking for is to study pages already ranking in the top 10 and to emulate key aspects of those pages on your own site. No, this does not mean plagiarizing text from your competition. Instead, it means emulating the basic statistical elements of the page such as keyword counts, link popularity, word counts, and other criteria.

Obviously, doing this by hand can be a daunting task even for a trained mathematician. We developed the Page Critic module in WebPosition Gold to make the job accessible even to the novice. It analyzes the densities of keywords on your page and your competition's pages, does the math, and then makes specific recommendations for improvement. Help links are provided to explain each step. It also includes an extensive knowledge base of tips and strategies for achieving top ten placements. The tips will vary for each search engine based upon its particular preferences.

Besides using a tool like WebPosition, books and newsletters can also be a valuable resource for staying informed. Books are often less helpful, though, as it doesn't take long before they become out of date in this industry. In addition, both kinds of resources can only go so far in their advice, whereas a software product can analyze your specific page, engine, and keyword choice, making recommendations much more appropriate to your situation.

4. Uploading - For many, this step will seem obvious. For novices, however, it's important to remember that anytime you make changes to your Web pages, you must upload the changes to your Web site. You can do this via your favorite FTP program, or an application like WebPosition or FrontPage that has uploading built-in.
5. Submitting - This is perhaps the best known of the seven steps, partly because you see so many advertisements for bulk submission to hundreds, or even thousands of Web sites. These services stay in business because people are attracted to the promise of a single-click, silver bullet solution. Unfortunately, submission is only one part of the process, and a minor one at that. Most of the sites on these bulk submission lists are not search engines at all, but simply scripts designed to gather names and e-mail addresses from unsuspecting search engine marketers. Only a relative handful of search engines command enough traffic to be worth promoting to.

Submissions can be done by hand or via a submission tool. In the case of WebPosition, it can help prevent you from making common mistakes like over submitting, submitting non-existent pages, losing track of what you have already submitted, and so forth. It also gives you estimates regarding how long it currently takes to get indexed at each engine, and when re-submission is recommended. Once you build some third-party links to your Web site, most engines like Google will re-spider your pages regularly without the need to re-submit.

6. Traffic and Revenue Tracking - Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are after, but more traffic and sales. This is where your investment in search engine optimization really pays off. We have many customers generating thousands of dollars a month in sales. Once you get your traffic-building pages set up, then the pay-off comes in month after month. There are many good tools out there for tracking traffic, with some that will even track revenues.
7. Follow up and fine-tuning - While some pages may rank well for a year or more without change, most pages will require refinements as the search engines change their ranking algorithm, and bring new pages online. It's important to measure your rankings at least monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank leveraging the latest Page Critic advice, and then re-submit or wait for the engine to revisit the page. The best part is that all that traffic is free, and highly targeted.