Copyright 2006 Angela Booth

If you're not optimizing your Web pages for the search engines, you're not only missing out on a lot of traffic, but chances are that it's costing you money, especially if you rely solely on Pay Per Click advertising to get traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is easy, and if you do it yourself, it's free: it just takes a little time, and a strategy.

If you follow the process outlined in this article, within a few weeks you'll be getting a flow of free traffic to your Web pages. What's more, the people who arrive on your site's pages will be targeted visitors, primed to buy from you, because you have just what they're looking for.

While the usual SEO process is well known, the process outlined in this article is different, because it focuses on creating landing pages -- destination pages -- as entry points to your Web site.

Let's look at the process.

Step 1: Discover who's looking for you

Start by thinking about your customers. Who's looking for you, and what terms would they type into a search engine query box to find you? The terms that they'd type into the search engines are your site's pages keywords and key phrases. Make a list of these keywords. If your site has been online for a few months, scan your referrer logs to see what keywords your visitors used. Because the search engines are basically just indexing software, your keywords are the keys to the SEO kingdom.

You'll use your lists of keywords and phrases as you optimize all your Web pages.

Use the keywords in: your page titles, your page descriptions, your meta tags, and of course in the content on the pages themselves. You should also use your keywords in internal links across your Web site. It's wise to get other site owners to link to you using the keywords for which you want to be found too. This tells the search engines exactly what your pages are about, and when the pages should be returned in the query results.

Optimize every page on your site with keywords which are specific to your site, as well as to each individual page. Aim to create around 300 to 800 words on each page. Although you won't manage lots of content for every page -- some pages don't need it -- the more text you can get onto your pages which includes your keywords the better.

Yes, this takes time, especially if you have a large site. However, it's time that will repay you over and over in the months and years to come, in FREE Web traffic.

In your optimization process, your individual pages are all-important: especially your site's landing pages.

Step 2: Create landing pages that sell

The strategy to optimize your Web site to get traffic and to make sales is to optimize each page, as well as to create specific "landing pages" for your site. This is because your pages get to the top of the search engine results pages, known as the SERPs, your sites don't. (The SERPs are the search engine pages which are returned when people enter search queries into the search engines' query fields.)

Step 3: Realize that landing page content is the emperor

You'll often hear that "content is king". However, this needs to be amended to "content is king, but landing page content is the emperor".

Landing pages are sometimes called "Web sales pages". Often they're developed as the landing point, so to speak, for PPC advertising. These pages usually have a lot of content, which makes them magnetic to the search engines.

Think of your landing pages as entry points, or destination pages, for your site. You want your landing pages to stand out -- they're the most important pages on your site.

Because they are so important, you'll want to create many landing pages for your site: these will be special pages that you create specifically for keywords for which you want to be discovered in the search engines. Consider creating a landing (sales) page with unique, information-rich content for each product and service that you sell.

Over time, your special landing pages will draw an ever-increasing flow of targeted traffic to your site. So in three steps, you've created powerful search engine optimization for your site.