Assuming you have completed all the previous modules of Profitable Niche Marketing Business then you should currently be focusing upon optimising a single, small niche business site, written using a fairly standard mark-up language such as HTML or PHP. Furthermore you will have completed your MKL (Master Keyword List) an be confident in the selection of your profitable niche keyword targets.

Of course you may have used a high quality SEO solution such as iBusinessPromotor (SEO) in which case your SEO will already have been done for you. However, as your site is the life blood of your business, it remains important that you understand the process of SEO.

The sole purpose of search engine optimisation is to make your profitable niche marketing site as search engine friendly as possible. It’s really not that complicated once you grasp some fundamental concepts. You don't need a specialised knowledge of algorithms, programming or taxonomy but you do require a basic understanding of how search engines work.

There are a couple of fundamental aspects of search engines optimisation you need to consider. Firstly you need to understand how the search engine 'spiders' work and how search engines figure out what documents relate to which keywords and key phrases. In addition, given that the spiders have successfully crawled your site, you need to understand what elements the search engines use to 'rank' your pages importance within their respective index. 

Then, once you have an overall grasp of spiders and search engine indexes, you need to consider how to create web pages which offer the greatest possible appeal to the spiders and incorporate the elements most favoured by the search engines.

In the simplest terms, search engines collect data about your website by sending a program, commonly referred to as as a 'spider', to visit your profitable niche marketing site and copy its content to the search engine’s database.

Also known as ‘bots’, these spiders are designed to follow links from one document to the next. As they copy and assimilate content from one document, they record links and send other bots to make copies of content on those linked documents. This process continues 24/7 and consequently the major search engines have established databases that are of truly staggering proportions.

Like a human reading a newspaper, starting in the top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by line from left to right. If columns are used (as they are in most sites), spiders will follow the left hand column to its conclusion before moving to central and right hand columns. If a spider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that link and send another bot to copy and record data found on the document that link leads to. The spider will proceed through the site until it records everything it possibly can.

The precise nature of the algorithms employed by the spiders are closely guarded secrets of the major search engines but it is increasingly apparent that quality of content is a genuine factor. Quite how they quantify this with an essentially mathematical algorithm is frankly unbelievable but both Google and Yahoo have an uncanny ability to judge the topic or 'theme' of web pages they are examining. They use this ability to judge the topical relationship of linked pages (and sites). 

Therefore when designing your link baiting strategy( See Profitable Niche Link Building ) the most valuable incoming links (and the only ones worth pursueing), come from sites that share topical themes.

once the spiders have collected the data from your profitable niche marketing site the Search Engines examine this collected data and, in effect, rank your site accordingly. Generally speaking (but not entirely) the more closely your site reflects the search engines index specification the higher it will rank.

Broadly speaking the search engines look at four basic elements of site design.

So given these considerations what steps should you take to optimise your site for the search engines. Firstly it should be noted that SEO is a massive subject in it's own right. If you want to learn more than we have time for here then you should check out some of the excellent titles found at Amazon. Similarly iBusinessPromotor (SEO) provides a comprehensive solution which optimises your niche marketing site for you.

Meta Tags

Search engines business is to provide their users with lists of documents that relate to user entered keyword phrases or queries. Therefore they need to determine which of the billions of documents contained within their databases is relevant to a small number of specific words. In order to do this, the search engine needs to know how your niche marketing site relates to those words.

Firstly, for both your site and/or individual documents there's the URL of a site and/or document (see A Profitable Niche Domain) and then the Title (Meta tag) and then the Description (Meta tag).

Titles should be written using the strongest keyword targets as concisely as possible. As a rule of thumb you should use the primary keyword target phrase from your MKL in the first few words in your niche marketing site 'Title'.  A key to writing a good 'Title' is to remember that human readers will see this as the reference link on the search engine results page. Don’t overload your 'Title' with keyword phrases. Concentrate on the strongest keywords that best describe the topic of the document content.

Search engines tend to use th 'Description' (Meta tag) to gather information on the topic or theme of the document. A well written Description is phrased in two or three complete sentences with the strongest keyword phrases woven early into each sentence. As with the 'Title', some search engines will display the 'Description' on the search results pages, generally using it in whole or in part to provide the text that appears under the reference link.

Good content is, without doubt, the most important aspect of search engine optimisation. A fundamental SEO truth is that search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic body text 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider with basic text content, SEOs offer the engines information in the easiest format for them to read. While some search engines can strip text and link content from Flash files, nothing beats basic body text when it comes to providing information to the spiders. Very good SEO providers, such as iBusinessPromotor (SEO), can almost always find a way to work basic body text into a site without compromising the designer’s intended look, feel and functionality.

The content itself should be thematically focused. The key is to keep it simple. Don't cover multiple topics on each page. This is confusing for spiders and search engines alike. The basic rule is that if you need to express more than one topic on a page, you need another page. Maintaining a pages unique topic-focused content is one of the most basic SEO techniques. It makes a site simpler for both users and the spiders. Don't be tempted into duplicating content or try to construct doorway pages specifically designed for search engine placement. Search engines have long been wise to such techniques and don't like them.

When writing document content, try to use the strongest keyword targets early in the copy. By placing the keyword phrases along side other keywords the sentence is crafted to help the search engine see a relationship between them. Subsequent sentences would also have keywords and phrases weaved into them. Unnecessary repetition of keywords will be considered spam by search engines and may result in removal of your site from their index.. Another thing to remember is that ultimately, the written copy is meant to be read by human eyes as well as search spiders. Each page or document in the site should have its own unique content.

One of the most important, basic SEO tips is to provide clear paths for spiders to follow within your niche marketing website. You should provide easy to follow text links directed to the most important pages in the site at the bottom of each page. One of these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap, which lists and provides a text link every page in your site. This can be very basic as its purpose is more to direct spiders than help lost site visitors though some consideration should be given to your site visitor also.

Furthermore Google accepts XML based sitemaps and many of the other search engines are now following suit. These are included in the root directory of your site and are exclusively for use by the spiders and, as such, are not incorporated in the link structure of your site. Similarly you may consider including “robot.txt” files as allowing spiders free access to the entire website is not always desirable.

Whilst not strictly an SEO technique link building (sometimes referred to as 'link baiting') is an important factor contributing to ranking of your site by the search engines. The quality of these links is far more important than sheer numbers and you should refer to see Profitable Niche Link Building for more information. 

The goal is to make a site easy to find, easy to follow, and easy to read for search spiders and live-visitors, with well written topical content and a fair number of relevant incoming links. While basic SEO can be time consuming in the early stages, the results are almost always worth it and set the stage for more advanced future work.