Keyword research or keyword analysis is one of the more challenging aspects of search engine marketing.

Selecting the most appropriate keywords or keyword phrases a website should be optimized for is ultimately the key to successful search engine positioning. If you're not targeting the right keywords and phrases, then even the best rankings are of little value.

Selecting keywords is a balance of choosing phrases that are relevant to your website, are sufficiently popular search phrases to warrant targeting (i.e. people are actually using these search phrases) and, where possible, have a low number of competing sites.More...

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spam indexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indices.More...

Online to please your visitors and convert them into customers, you can neither possibly overlook the phenomenal significance of search engines (like Google, Yahoo, MSN), nor forget the natural emphasis of your end users for good looks and informative feel. You target optimum conversion rate for maximum web traffic, translating into two imperatives as regards your website design - it must be user-friendly and search engine friendly.

Before you design your website, research some 100 highly targeted keywords relevant to your website business and zero down to keywords that are often-used but produce lesser number of competing websites. While too many keywords may squeeze away the meaningfulness and finesse of the information from a user’s point of view, it may well declare the web page as ‘doorway pages’ to the search engines due to excessive optimization for higher ranking.

Look and organization of your website invariably influence the interest and impression of your end users, as well as, help search engine spiders rank your website. While images enhance user experience, they may also slow website’s download time. You must make sure that images are used only when meaningful. Keeping the graphics/images less and light, with due use of alt tag including short descriptions, is advisable. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) aid consistent layout, as well as, overall updating later.

Keyword optimized meta and heading tags, with crisp titles and descriptions, also help attract consequential search-engine attention.

It is indispensable to ensure that the organization of your site is hierarchically logical and consistent. It is advisable to include a site map if your site has more than 10 pages. It is also wise to stick to obvious descriptions/titles for navigation buttons/tools. It is an absolute must that all internal web pages sport a link to the homepage. This also increases the number of links pointing to your home page.

it is a good idea to write concise HTML code and keep the lengthy javascript codes in external files, to enable search engine spiders scan content rather than code. It is also advisable to insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of each web page to keep them compliant with browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac and IE6/Win. Healthy user experience and higher ranking among SERPs are highly interrelated. Search engine algorithms place natural importance to popularity for ranking. In short, easy to navigate and easy to use web design is a search-engine friendly web design!