SEO has become most popular and most effective strategy for increasing website traffic today. It gives you more exposure, pulls in more qualified visitors and helps you substantially increase your income. So, if you are a home based business owner with a serious web presence you would know importance of attracting quality traffic to your website. Among all strategies and tactics you can employ to attract focused web traffic to your site, optimising your website to get in top SE rankings is most important. However to keep your rankings that way you have to be on top of what is happening in SE industry. To understand how search engines work, spend some time at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,316408,00.html

Here are some great ways to optimize your site to get to top of SE rankings and stay that way:

The Internet has changed way we access information, and way we buy and sell products and services. When it works, which, fortunately, is most of time, ideas and cash flow from person to person, company to company, and country to country.

But when inevitable happens and your pages go down, your business, your bank account and your reputation can suffer, especially if you are unaware of down status of your e-business operations for more than a few minutes. One way this can hurt you is with search engines.

Whether you operate a corporate website, a mom-and-pop or something in between, there’s no question about it. If you want to get traffic via search engines, you have to work at getting and maintaining placement on first page of current “big four” — Google, Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves. Depending on keywords you’re trying to get high results for, this can be a time-and-resource intensive process.

Everyone who uses search engine marketing knows that getting and keeping high placement is an ongoing process filled with many unknowns. The rules of game seem to change without notice, causing frustration, disappointment and even desperation among beginners and veterans alike. Methods that work today may not work tomorrow. Tactics that may be “legal” today may cause problems tomorrow.

It’s as if, despite all research, experimentation and best intentions, there really is no exact formula that can be applied to guarantee results. There is, however, one aspect of search engine marketing that is a known quantity. If your pages are down — even briefly — when spiders visit, you run risk of losing your place. And unless they come back up immediately, they may be dropped altogether.

For example, Google’s “Information for Webmasters” area says that if your pages cannot be crawled after several attempts due to network or hosting problems, they won’t be listed — meaning they’ll be dropped — and it may take “a few weeks” to for them to show up again. MSN’s guidelines state that if your server is offline or there is another access problem when their spider tries to crawl your site, it may not return “until a later time.” Neither Yahoo nor AskJeeves seems to have guidelines on this issue, but it’s reasonable to assume that they and other search engine spiders operate like Google and MSN.