The key to most of Internet marketing is search engine optimisation. The key to good search engine optimisation is keyword research.

In other words, knowing which keywords or search terms people are using to find what they’re looking for on the Internet. If keyword research is done properly then there is no doubt that you will get highly targeted visitors to your website. This is obviously the professional way of going about things. It is the antithesis to the "spam" approach (unsolicited commercial emails) which achieves extremely poor results and annoys anyone on the receiving end.

But which search engine should you optimise for? The search engine of choice at the moment is Google. I believe there are two good reasons for this. Firstly, Google is the most popular search engine on the Internet today. It is known for a simple interface without adverts and for the quality and relevance of its search results, so people trust it. Secondly, over the last couple of years Google has joined alliances with other search engines and directories. Yahoo, the world’s most popular directory, uses Google’s database, so if you have a first page listing on Google you are likely to have a first page listing on Yahoo as well.

AOL and Netscape also share Google’s search findings, so you’ll have similar search results on the AOL and Netscape databases. Other lesser databases also rely on Google, so that if you are well represented on Google, then you’ll be well represented on over sixty per cent of Internet search facilities.

You should also obtain a listing on the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) which is well known and well respected in the search engine optimisation industry. The Open Directory does not use the normal search engine "spiders" or robot searchers; instead it uses over thirty thousand volunteer human editors who are ostensibly experts in their own fields. The theory behind this is that it ensures relevancy, accuracy and quality of all listings. A listing in DMOZ will therefore ensure a listing on Google and probably will get you an enhanced ranking there. Then all the others, like Yahoo, AOL, Netscape and the rest are bound to follow.

After optimisation is the submission process. Experience tells me that it is best to submit manually. Manual submissions to dozens of search engines and directories can be very time-consuming, however. There are some good automated and semi-automated software packages available out there to do the submissions for you. But for the major SEO players do find the time for manual submissions. Yahoo needs manual submission, since the search engine implemented RSS feed. Some search engines, for example Alta Vista, make it impossible for automated submission by software programs, because of individualised text codes that must be entered by hand at the start of the submission process, so you have to submit to Alta Vista manually as well. But that just takes about three minutes.

Ignore ads that say that they can "blast your web site to 500,000 search engines". There aren’t that many search engines; there is only a few hundred in total, and only about a dozen of major importance. You’ll just pay your money and be very disappointed. Most of these so-called search engines are FFA, link farms or free-for-all sites, which nobody every looks at, and which are responsible chiefly for sending out spam. If you link to such web sites you risk being penalised by the major search engines.

The next thing to have lots of is patience. A listing on Google should appear within a couple of weeks if you have optimised your pages properly (incidentally, if you have multiple pages on your web site, as is mostly the case, it is important only to submit the index page, and let Google’s spider "Googlebot" find and index the other pages, Googlebot is using the footer links that you should have set up on your site.

My business is search engine optimisation. I also sell a eBook telling you the secrets of getting a high ranking on search engines.

Visit my site: http://www.ultimate-mlm.com

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