Today, with thousands and thousands of different websites out there fighting for top position, SEO has become one of the most important tools to optimize your websites ranking and position. Without it, you will soon join the 95% of failed e-commerce sites.

What is Search Engine Optimization? First of all, search engines using their spiders crawl all the different websites out there, and rank and/or categorize them according to what the spider finds. The information the search engines find is then used when you or I type in a keyword, looking for information.

The majority of people searching, will only use the first ten or so results shown by their search engine (I like to check the first four pages, but most people don't). Because of this, it is vital that a website is ranked as high as possible. The higher the ranking, the more clicks resulting in more traffic which in turns means more business for you.

How do you optimize your site? It is a lot of work, with some research thrown in. You need to be sure the content of your site is important, using facts, figures and statistics if necessary. Keywords and keyword phrases are important as these are used by the search engine to help in ranking the page. Just don't scatter the keywords around randomly like seeding the lawn. The keywords need to be pertinent to the content and niche theme of your site.

Often, rewriting the content of the site so that the addition of your keywords flows naturally is necessary. You don't want it to be overbearingly commercial, but still informative. There are several rules to follow in keeping your content/keyword search engine friendly. It is best to research your favorite search engines-more than one, more than two, at least three to find out their position. It seems that sometime their guidelines change almost daily.

One useful method is link exchange. By exchanging links with sites that are higher ranked than yours, your site gains some respectability, boosting your ranking a little higher. This is always done by getting permission from the other site, because you want a back link from them, which is more important than your link to the other site.

Great content, mixed properly with the proper keywords and phrases, link and back links all play an important part in search engine optimization. Linking to an article directory is also useful, as well as linking to a blog. Sometimes, an RSS feed is useful if you can find subject matter that will enhance the content on your site, or at least not distract from it.

If you have money to spend, then you can get professional SEO done to your site. There are also content writers out there that would be happy to assist you.

The bottom line, is that the better the content, keyword density, the more links and back links the better the search engines will view your site. The better viewed and "graded", the higher your ranking, which results in higher placement on a search page . This ultimately leads to more traffic and more sales.