Building your online business should always focus, first, on getting traffic and building a list of targeted prospects. Increasing your conversion rate is the rest of what you should focus on, but it all begins with traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the fine art of setting up your website to attract search engines and make them like your site Sherry Dyson. The better job you do on your SEO, the higher up the rankings you will appear in the list, making your site appear more relevant and trustworthy in the eyes of your visitors. Here are three simple SEO tactics you can use to get your site listed higher in the organic search engine results.

1) Define your keywords. Choose 50-75 keywords that you think people will enter into the search engines when looking for what you offer in your products and services. This is an absolutely vital step if you want to be recognized with the search engines. Then when you have your list of keywords, start using them in all your content: your sales pages, your articles, your resource pages, etc.

2) Start a blog. Blogs can be set up for free. You can start a discussion, post the emails you send to your list, invite other people to comment on your opinions and generally interact with your prospects and customers in a way that email sometimes does not allow.

Search engines love blogs because they include built in RSS (real simple syndication), are updated often and other bloggers can link to your blog whenever you post something they feel is worth telling their readers about.

Often, innovations arising from technological advances become truly profound only after some kind of commonly available way to leverage their potential emerges.

With the explosion of Internet growth during the 1990s, users sought broader mechanisms for both collaborating and sharing personal information. It was one thing to browse corporate websites or dredge through newsgroups, but with friendlier tools, more numerous providers and increasing old media attention, exponential growth in blogging, the online posting of various logs and journals, was a matter of time. Since, blogging has become an integral part of Internet culture, new media and online communication. From the posting of personal journals and pet pictures up to the influence of political parties and the near-immediate validation of traditional journalism, the impact of this medium has become undeniable.

In its simplest form, blogging is posting of chronological journal entries, with the newest at the top of the page, allowing the viewer to see the most current posts first. There are generally mechanisms to capture review previous periods’ posts in archives and to comment or send trackbacks. Groups of blogs covering similar ideas might group together as communities or provide links to posts with complementary content.

Quality varies as much as can be imagined; content, a key to a blog’s success, can encompass nearly anything, from the personal to the political, the corporate marketing ploy to the technical help site, the news link to the ill-informed rant. Since blogs are now thought to number in the millions, with thousands more joining each day, sorting through to find appropriate and useful content can be challenging. The types of blogs available are numerous and vary from text-based journal entries to video or audio podcasts. With minor investments in equipment, a little internet savvy and some interesting ideas, a successful online presence can be created – likely finding an audience willing to look in unorthodox places for desired content.

But the true power of this concept is not in its passive cool, but the relative impact it has induced. Nearly anyone with Internet access can become a blogger, making this technology seriously innovative – old rules of information gathering are being rewritten by armies of users seeking and trading information on a global scale, more easily than at any time in human history. Even traditional outposts of news – dailies, magazines and opinion journals, for example, now have staff devoted to blogging, not only to keep astride cultural trends, but to circumvent the limitations of a 24-hour news day.