It doesn’t take much online experience to know that search engines are a valuable source of traffic for your website. Aside from the costs associated with optimizing your website, the traffic is pretty much free. It takes time more than money for those who don’t pay professional search engine optimization firms.

The basics of search engine optimization include using your keywords appropriately on your page, building quality links to your site and so forth. Overusing your keywords, hiding them on your page and trading links from any site, no matter the quality or relevance, are not so good for your site, although people have certainly had luck with those at various times.

One thing beginners often do is submit their sites to the search engines. Strictly speaking this is not necessary, although it generally does not do any harm. In the case of Google, if you want to submit your site to it you are better off creating an XML sitemap for them and submitting that. Yahoo also has a place for you to submit your sitemaps.

Some people get confused when you tell them not to submit to search engines. They see all the sites offering submission to thousands of search engines. What they don’t realize is that there are very few search engines that matter, and all of them would rather discover your sites through links. This includes Google and Yahoo, which are more likely to visit more of your site if you have quality links pointing to it, sitemap or no.

Another point of confusion is submitting your site to directories. This can indeed be worthwhile, sometimes even worth paying for. I find the list of free directories at Info Vilesilencer quite useful. This is one of the ways in which people get confused about submission, as they confuse search engines and directories.

Submitting to directories certainly should not be your only source of inbound links. You can write articles and include a required link in your resource box. You might be surprised at some of the places a submitted article can end up.

Search engine optimization is not something you do once and then ignore. It’s an ongoing process as what the search engines want change, your topic changes and what people are looking for changes. You can be number one for an obscure term, but if no one is searching for it, you’re out of luck. On the other hand, if your topic suddenly becomes popular you can be in a great position.

I recommend spending time regularly on your search engine optimization efforts. It doesn’t have to be every day if that isn’t your style, but don’t let too much time go by without trying to get more links to your site, updating your content (search engines are reputed to love fresh content), and generally trying to figure out what will bring qualified people to your business.

Technorati Tags: , ,