Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

Keywords :- Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine, they are what search strings are matched against. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is thus the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign.

Meta tags are used to summarize information of a page for search engine crawlers. This information is not directly visibles to humans visiting your website. The most popular are the meta keywords and description tag. The meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your Web site is relevant to. A potential use of the Meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages.

Images :- The idea is that images should be used for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse – for displaying text (in a fancy font, for example). And the most important – in the attribute of the tag, always provide a meaningful textual description of the image. The HTML specification does not require this but search engines do.

Baacklinks :- There are two types of links: inbound and outbound. Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while inbound links or backlinks. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines like Google, give more credit to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

URL Rewriting :- Static URL is always good then dynamic URL. The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages.

After you have finished optimizing your new site, time comes to submit it to search engines. In addition to search engines, you may also want to have your site included in search directories as well. Although search directories also list sites that are relevant to a given topic, they are different from search engines in several aspects. Sometimes posting a link to your site in the right forums or special sites can do miracles in terms of traffic. You need to find the forums and sites that are leaders in the fields of interest to you but generally even a simple search in Google or the other major search engines will retrieve their names.