One of the most critical elements to the success and growth of your business online is not just in having an online piece of real estate, but in how well your website is optimized for search engines.

In this article I am going to pull back the curtain and give five essential elements needed on how to optimize your website for search engines.

1)      Site description also known as Meta tag description is often overlooked by the do-it-yourself person. This has been proven to be one of the most costly errors on their part. You must make certain that you site description is concise and layered with your main keyword and keyword phrases.  Now make sure that Title tags are also taken care of. What you want to do here is make sure that you give a title to each page so that the search engines are able to discover what you have to offer their readers.

2)      Place keywords throughout your site so that it shows how dense your site is with material that is relevant for your readers. If you have never done keyword research in the past one tool that you can use is WordTracker.com. Here you can begin to get a feel for what your audience is actually searching for on a daily basis. Keyword research is the key in developing a site that not only the search engines will simply love, but that your readers will find.

3)      Content, content and more content. Content is king when it comes to the search engines. Think of it this way, if you were buying a late model car, and decided to go to Google in order to find some reviews and all it kept sending back was information about similar cars built ten years ago, how relevant and valuable would that be for you? It simply wouldn’t. That is why in order to continue to climb through the search engines, you must provide new, unique relevant content on your site. This alone is one of the main reasons why static website, although they can look pretty, are becoming the dinosaur of having an online presence.

4)      You must avoid using frames on your website whenever possible. Frames are sections that are added to sites in order to either pull information in from another source or it allows you to have multiple sections on specific pages of one site. The problem here is that as sites become more and more dynamic, frames make it harder for sites to be optimized. Remember the key is to have your site found by the search engines “quickly”.

5)      Building incoming back links to your site. This is the gold that many people miss time and time again. You want to develop a good routine on building high quality back links to your site from web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com. These are just two small examples. If you take your time building your back links properly you will find that your natural appeal to your viewership will grow.

These simple yet breakthrough type changes will dramatically increase your ability to be found by the search engines allowing you to see some amazing results in your business when done properly and consistently. Let me know what you thought of this article by leaving a comment.