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Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized the page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in search engine result listings. This is especially critical because most people who use search engines only look at the first page or two of the search results, so for a page to get high traffic from a search engine, it has to be listed in those first two pages.

So search engine optimization focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page has appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the page are distributed throughout the content in a way that the particular search engine will like.

Search engines find and catalog web pages through spidering software. Unfortunately, not all search engine spidering software works the same way, so what gives a page a high ranking on one search engine may not give it a high ranking on another.

One of the things that search engine optimization specialists do is keep track of all the changes in search engine operations so they can optimize pages accordingly. They also keep up with changes in the different search engine submission policies.

When you choose a designer to create a business web site, you should ask him or her about search engine optimization, as search engine optimization should be built into your pages. While it's never too late to optimize or tweak pages that have already been published, it's a lot easier and more sensible to include search engine optimization when the page is first written. Five rules to optimize your list are:

1) Remember that each page of your site is a separate entity. You need to apply the basics of effective search engine optimization to each individual page.

2) Choose appropriate key words or phrases for each page. For instance, although this page is part of the Small Business: European site, that is not one of the key phrases I have chosen for search engine optimization. Phrasing matters. Many more people search for the term "effective search engine optimization" than for "effectively optimizing for search engines". To find out which key words or phrases are more popular than others, you can use a tool such as track it; enter your chosen phrases and you'll see how many people searched for that term recently.

3) Give each page an appropriate title that includes the key word or phrase at least once. I so often see sites that use the name of their business as the title of all their pages. Is every page of their site about their business? Probably. But chances are low that people will be searching for their business' name!

4) Put the key words or phrase that you have chosen in the page's title tag, meta keywords, and meta description. Make sure that the meta description is as appealing as possible, because some search engines actually use this description in the search engine results pages that people will be reading.

5) Be sure your chosen key words or phrase is repeats judiciously throughout the content of the page. You don't want to overdo it, or your page may be rejected as Spam, but you need to repeat it enough times that the search engine's software will consider the phrase relevant.

As anyone in the business will tell you, these are the barebones basics of effective search engine optimization. But applying just these five basic rules of search engine optimization will give your web pages a much better chance of showing up on those critical first few pages of returned results. [ ]