Unfortunately, many folks create a Web site and then sit back and wait for the orders to start pouring in. That strategy doesn’t work in the field of Internet marketing any more than it does in the offline world. With millions of new Web sites being added to the Internet every month, the old days of hanging out your shingle and waiting for customers to beat a path to your door are long gone.

Effective search engine marketing (SEM) is what separates winners from losers in the world of Internet marketing. And when it comes to SEM you have two choices. The first option is to optimize your site so that search engines find you easily and give you good ranking in their index. The second choice is to buy higher placement on search engines using paid inclusion or pay-per-click (PPC). In other words, you can pray for clicks or pay for clicks, the choice is yours.

Praying for clicks is better known as Web site optimization. When taking this approach, it helps if you offer the search engine gods a peace offering by making it easy for their spiders to find and index you. (Spiders are programs that crawl all over the Web searching for pages.) Whether you choose to optimize your site yourself or pay a search engine marketing firm to do it for you the same strategy will apply, and you should be involved in every step of the process.

Keyword Selection

Choosing the right keywords and phrases for optimization is crucial. If you choose keywords that few people search for, then you can achieve a lot of top search engine rankings, but won’t get any customers. If you choose keywords that are too competitive you’ll find the competition won’t allow you to achieve any decent rank. You should also choose keywords that are attractive to your customer demographic; otherwise visitors will arrive at your site but never make a purchase. Simply make a list of relevant keywords that balance both popularity and competition. Use a keyword research tool like Word Tracker or Overture’s Search Term Suggestion feature to do this quickly and easily.

Measure Your Rankings

Before you can improve your position, you must know where you rank for the keywords and phrases that relate to your business’s products and services. If you did a good job in picking keywords, you should now have a list of highly relevant words and phrases that your customers are using. Use a tool like Web Position Gold, or my company’s free tools at TrafficMentorSEO.com/tools .html to determine where you rank for your targeted keywords on the major search engines.

Page Content

One of the easiest ways to attract both search engine spiders and qualified traffic to your Web site is to create Web pages that are appealing both to the user and to the spider. Spiders like to see short pages with lots of text and few graphics. People probably like to see more pictures. After all, any picture is worth a thousand words, just not to spiders. Balance is what counts. Creating pages that are attractive to users and spiders and free of annoying distractions like flash and frames is the name of the game. Try to create one page for each keyword or phrase you are targeting, and develop quality content that will bring users back to your site again and again.

Optimization

This is the main focus of search engine marketing and the piece that makes all the difference in your Web site’s ability to compete effectively. Simply stated, your goal is to give the search engine spider fodder. The easiest way to determine what it wants is to study pages already ranking in the top 10 and to emulate key aspects of those pages on your own site. Don’t copy your competitors’ source code and content line for line, just learn from their example. Study the basic statistical elements of the page such as meta tags, keyword counts, link popularity, word counts, etc. A good free tool to keep you on track and ensure that your page is spider-worthy can be found at InstantPosition.com.

Submitting

Don’t try to use a submission service to submit your pages to thousands of search engines and directories. These services are a complete ripoff. There are only a few search engines that count in terms of traffic, and you are better off submitting to them manually or using a tool like Web Position. Once you develop some third-party links to your Web site, most engines like Google will re-spider your pages regularly without the need to re-submit.

Traffic and Revenue Tracking

Ultimately, it isn’t just top rankings you want, but more targeted traffic and sales. This is where your investment in search engine optimization really pays off. Once you get your traffic-building pages set up, the pay-off comes in consistently. Utilize one of the many good tools out there for tracking visitors and revenues. You can use these solutions to track both PPC campaigns and organic visitors and you will learn a lot in the process about your site’s usability and its ability to convert visitors into customers.

Follow Up

While some pages may rank well for a long time without changes, most pages will require fine-tuning as the search engines change their ranking algorithms, and index new pages. It’s important to measure your rankings at least monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then resubmit or wait for the engine to revisit the page.

The search engine marketplace can be daunting as things are constantly changing. In order to keep up your top rankings you need to stay informed. Read as much as you can. Sign up for the many search engine newsletters and forums and apply the tips in them religiously.

After that, just sit back and smile as you watch all the visitors coming to your Web site. The best part is that all that traffic is free, and highly targeted. Yes, sometimes even the gods can be friendly.

MARY O’BRIEN is a partner at Traffic- Mentor.net. She has worked in Internet marketing for the past five years and was formerly senior director of sales at Overture.com.