What would be point? To get tons of traffic? Maybe. But people searching on "weight loss" could be looking for everything from weight loss diet books... to weight loss prescription drugs... to scientific studies on weight loss in middle aged men... to weight loss as a symptom of a rare blood disease. Do you really care about getting ALL those untargeted visitors to your site? Are they ALL good prospects for your supplements? NO.

So before you spend one single penny - or one minute -building your web site, find out what low competition search phrases are for your particular product. It doesn't matter whether you are an affiliate selling someone else's product, or marketing your own proprietary supplements. Do your keyword research BEFORE, not after you've built your site.

Avoid setting an impossible goal, such as being #1 in Google for a general term like "weight loss." Isn't it wiser - and easier on you - to invest $1,000 building a site filled with specialized pages, each of which revolves around ONE highly targeted keyword like "over 40 woman's herbal weight loss"?

As Sean Burns explains in his book, Rankings Revealed, think about business goals of your site. Strive to be successful with 50 highly focused pages, each of which ranks high for a single phrase. Don't build 200 pages that are trying to push you to top for a general term that won't bring you much real business anyway.

Keyword research and targeted pages are a smarter investment than hundreds of doorway pages that may get banned tomorrow. With techniques we teach at DominateSearchEngines.com. You can build key word-targeted pages that are actually useful to your visitors. But you have to know which keywords to focus on FIRST.

Every Web site owner wants people to visit their site, but very few understand role search engines play in getting those people there. And fewer still, understand how relevant content can not only attract search engines, but convert your visitors into paying customers.

Have no fear. This guide will help you understand relatively simple steps you can take to make sure search engines send targeted traffic to your site, and increase your sales.

But before we begin it’s important to understand how search engines work, and make distinction between crawler-based search engines like Google and a directory like DMOZ.

Part One - Understanding difference between search engines and directories

Crawler-based search engines.

Crawler-based search engines, or spiders, literally “crawl” Web looking for content. They’re able to do this because of way pages on Internet link to other pages by way of hyperlinks. Anyone who’s sat down at computer “for five minutes” to find information has experienced this linking system—hours later you’re still there, completely off track, clicking away from one page to another to another.

The search engines use this linking system in much same way as human users. For example, when Google sends its “spider” (fondly known as GoogleBot) to “crawl” Web it follows links from page to page indexing content it finds along way. The information is then stored in a huge database somewhere at Google. Later, when someone enters a particular word or phrase into search box, Google scans its database for possible matches. It then displays pages that contain, or relate to word or phrase in an order it considers most relevant.

There are really only two major crawler-based search engines, Google and Yahoo. The others, with exception of several smaller engines such as, Ask Jeeves/Teoma and engines based outside United States, get their results from these two. See below to find out which engine supplies and which engines receive.