Getting an advantage in the competitive online marketplace can be quite challenging. Once online marketers start to see some success, some have a tendency to put their head down and focus solely on the business at hand. This can lead to missing some of the other opportunities to gain business, like using SEO.

The top webmasters have an understanding of SEO and how it affects their sites. There are many myths about SEO and what it is, but even if you have never heard the term it can be easy to apply and benefit from SEO.

SEO is the process of making technical and stylistic changes to optimize your site. The technical optimization takes the form of using the proper Meta Tags, Alt Image Tags, and off-page optimization techniques. the style changes are made to make the content more friendly to the search engines, bold, title, highlighting keywords help the search engines deliver more accurate results.

The natural outcome of optimizing a site is increased traffic from search engines, and ranking higher in the results that are delivered to their users.

SEO may or may not mean changing the overall look of your site. Although, sometimes it is a good idea to make structural changes to a site to make it easier for the search engine to read the page. Many times some subtle changes in your headings, focusing on your keywords in text, adding content can make a big difference in your overall SEO.

Depending on how competitive your chosen keywords are, you can expect to see results from your SEO efforts fairly quickly, sometimes in just a few days. To start your SEO effort, however, use broader, less competitive keywords and work your way up to the more competitive ones. This way you can get the momentum going and gain PageRank to compete in the more competitive terms as you move up in the search results.

Tracking your website statistics is the best way to track your SEO and know if your SEO efforts are bringing the desired results. Most hosting sites offer basic statistics for this, or check out Google Analytics.

Pay attention to the source of your traffic as you analyze the data. If you see increasing referrals from Google, MSN, Yahoo or another search engine, then your efforts are working. Then, watch where your traffic is coming from on a geographic area. If you only ship to The US, you wouldn't want to attract visitors from Australia. If you sell globally, then you will be able to determine where you product is hot.

When using other advertising like pay per click etc, direct that traffic to special pages so you don't skew the results from your paid advertising.

SEO is far and away the best way to attract free, highly targeted traffic to your site. The increased traffic and sales that come from incorporating SEO into your marketing and advertising make it well worth the effort.