Your SEO Private Teacher

When setting up your work from home online business, one of your first priorities is to set up a website. You will need to drive traffic to your new website, so that you can build your customer base and, ultimately, start to make some money online.

Basically, search engine optimisation, often abbreviated to SEO, is a process of choosing the most appropriate keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that these keywords rank your site highly in search results. This means that when someone searches for specific phrases, your website is at the top, or at least on the first page, of the results.

Keywords are the phrases or text that you want for search engines to find and then to provide to people who have searched for that keyword on the internet. For example when someone searches for "work from home business tips" they want to find information that is related to that search.

SEO involves fine tuning the content of your site with the HTML and Meta tags. HTML (HyperText Markup Language), are the elements which form the building blocks of all websites that allow items such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes, images and objects to appear on a website. Meta tags are not seen by website users and their purpose is to provide data to search engines.

Currently, the most popular search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo Search, Ask and AOL Search.

Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms, or search formulas, secret in an effort to get the best search results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks first in a particular search engine could rank at one hundred in another.

When you set up your new work from home website, a simple link from a well established website will get the search engines to visit your new site and begin to check its contents. It can take a few days, or even longer, to start indexing your new website.

Search engines are important as they bring visitors to your home business website. When a potential customer types something for search (eg, home business tips), the search engine will instantly sift through the millions of pages it has indexed and present the user with the results that match the topic.

The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer to your work from home business will probably only look at the first few listings in the search results, so it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking and why you need to have good optimisation for your website.