If you desire to make a solid income online, you will have to learn how the Internet works and more specifically, the search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the term that refers to changing the keywords of your website and building incoming links so that the search engines will rank your website on top to get targeted traffic to your site.

To get your website to make money for you, it has to attract traffic. Of all the visitors that will grace your site, 20% will find your site through either one of the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. These search engines will pull up your site based on the keywords and your content that you have displayed on your most prominent page. That’s right, your most prominently visited page. Want to know what that means? Before we answer that, we want to tell you how search engines work.

Search engines deploy specialized software whose capabilities include searching and displaying web pages’ content and links while at the same time ignoring the images and any animation on the site. In a nutshell, this is how browsers like Internet Explorer or Mozilla work. This robot software codes that search the Internet are popularly known as “spiders” and they crawls the Internet looking for new content and any updated links to see which site is showing the most activity as far as updates and relevancy. The term “new content” is very important. If your site has redundant content, the spiders will get the impression that your site is not very important and therefore they will not waste time referring anyone to it. Other websites which are regularly updated will get the top spots and your site will get bottom last.

So what does it take to appear at the top spots in the three major search engines, or even just Google? Earlier on, we mentioned the term, most prominently visited pages. On your website, there is a page that people love to visit more than to other pages. In personal websites, this page could be the photo gallery, or where there is interaction like a guestbook or blog where people are reading and commenting. This is the page that the search engine spiders will index first.

The most important thing you need to do in SEO for getting top rankings in search engines is to build relevant incoming links to your website. Relevant incoming links simple mean the links from other relevant websites pointing to your website. The more relevant incoming links you have, the higher your search engines rankings. There are plenty of techniques of building incoming links, you can learn them free by searching the free SEO resources sites on the Internet.

Another helpful SEO tactic is to include your websites keywords on your title bar. This little-know technique will surely get Google’s attention. Instead of saying ACME Brick on your title bar, you can incorporate something like “red brick for construction” or “a company that sells red brick for construction”. If you are a webmaster that can get into the engine of the site and mess around with the code, a helpful addition would be to also add keywords to the site’s description Meta tags. This will also get you the attention of Google.

Finally, content, content, content and fresh content. We cannot stress that more. If your site lacks the most relevant item of all, content, which is the food of the Internet; you may want to review why you even have a website in the first place. Website which employ smart SEO tactics like those described here are sure to get the most traffic.

Alan Liew is passionate about blog marketing and SEO. He builds blog to make money online