SEO is the foundation of internet marketing. It brings quality traffic to your site without you paying for every click that you get. This explains why so many webmasters are engaging SEO agencies and professionals to help improve their organic rankings.

To do well in SEO, you must understand some basic concepts. It is not as complicated as you think, but I must say it is time-consuming. SEO is not a campaign; it is an on-going process, and as long as your site is still running live on the Internet, you should make SEO operational.

In this article, I will share with you 5 optimization tips that you can apply right away to your website:

1. Write quality content. Search engines like Google hates duplicate content. Therefore, the content on your site should be unique and informational. If you are using article marketing to build backlinks, make sure that the articles that you distribute are not the same as the content on your site. Your content should also be relevant to your target audience. The more relevant your content, the more targeted traffic you will get from search engines. Moreover, with quality content, you can also entice other webmasters to link to your site and increase your site's link popularity, which will help improve your organic rankings.

2. Optimize the right key phrases and theme. To achieve successful SEO results, you need to target the right key phrases. You must understand what key phrases or keywords your target audience uses when looking for the product or service that you provide. Also, make sure that the key phrases that you intend to optimize have search volume. Optimizing keywords that nobody uses is a complete waste of time. Your content should also follow a certain keyword theme as this will bring you targeted long-tail traffic.

3. On-page optimization. First of all, your site design and architecture must be search engine friendly. In other words, it should not consist of roadblocks that prevent search engine spiders from indexing your site. Some examples of potential roadblocks are flash, frames, JavaScript and excessive use of images. Place the most important keywords at the beginning of your Title tag. Also, keywords should be placed in Meta tags, Header tags and ALT tags.

4. Include a Google sitemap.xml file. This sitemap.xml file is to facilitate Google to crawl your site. It will include the URLs of every page and you can specify the frequency that Google robot should return to your site for content updates. Upload this file onto the root directory of your hosting server.

5. Link building. Link building is extremely important to boost your search rankings. You should always be getting backlinks to your site. You can use methods such as article marketing, manual directory submission, social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and forum marketing.

When you know the basics, SEO is not difficult. SEO can bring you targeted traffic and it will assist your conversions.