This is a very important step and is often missed by web designers. If you own a corporate web site, if you are a vendor selling products or selling services, each page on your site must have optimized markup or you won’t compete fully for traffic.

There are some basic areas of the code to look at:

• The keywords chosen for your niche should be present in the <title> tag. The title is what appears in search engines frequently.
• Ensure the content is optimized for your top keywords and not too many of them. Ensure these keywords are in the first paragraph and final paragraph.
• Include header <h1> and <h2> tags and again ensure that the most popular keywords are in the text.
• Use keywords in the <alt> tags for your images. Your images need to relate to the content on the page.

An abundance of tools exist that claim to optimize SEO campaigns so that you attract visits to your site and increase your revenue through selling products or advertising. There are two tools that can help here and as they are both completely free with fantastic reporting facilities, I am highly recommending that you take a look.

Google Webmaster Tools at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
SEO Bugs at http://www.seobugz.com

Google Webmaster Tools is a vast array of SEO toolsets for beginner to advanced web marketers. Its all free and can be applied to a web site or a personal blog. Adding your page is easy with just a click or two. Then Google asks that you verify your page by uploading an html file or inserting meta tag code. Once you have done this Google can gain access to your pages and report traffic statistics. You can also run diagnostics to see how your pages are ranking on the search engines.

These tools allow you to monitor how well each of your site pages is being found by people using Google to find your products. You can retrieve a list of sites in a table that shows what external sites are pointing to your pages. This is important in ranking, the more one-way links from other sites, the higher your pages will rank.

The tools allow you to create a sitemap for your web site so allowing Google to index all the pages and paths on your domain. You can control the pages that are being crawled by creating a robots.txt file very easily within the tools. The diagnostics will crawl your pages looking for errors so you can further optimize your pages.

Google has excelled in the area of SEO. An AdWords tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal allows you to generate a focused keyword list aimed at your niche for use in article marketing and AdWords campaigns. Google Analytics at https://www.google.com/analytics allows you to track visitors and their sources in graphs that show the stats daily and monthly.

SEO is very important in your web marketing efforts as you need to be actively optimizing your web pages for the search engines. This way you will ensure your sites are ranked high for the popular keywords used to find your content. Ensure the keywords hold contextual relevance pertaining to the subject matter of your page and Google will thank you for it by increasing your ranking.

Don’t forget to add links to quality and relevant web sites, just as you should add links on their sites. Blogging and the use of free web services like hubpages and squidoo can really help to drive traffic to you site using appropriate articles with links.

To conclude here, try adding video to your site. If you don’t have one, or can’t create one, take a look on YouTube for relevant videos and use the embed code supplied to seat the video on your site. These tips will improve the quality of your traffic and hence conversions. Work it for the search engines and they will work for you!