By carefully choosing the best relevant keywords and then using solid offpage optimization, you will be guaranteed increased online traffic for your website. This is good news for affiliate marketers and anyone needing mass traffic in order to achieve online sales goals. It takes a little work but is well worth the effort, so don't be lazy!

Your very first consideration when optimizing webpages should be keywords. Your online success is determined on how well you can choose these; After all, this is what visitors have typed into google or another search engine to find what they are looking for.

Keywords should be in demand, meaning frequent searches are being conducted on Google, Yahoo! , MSN etc. Words with a count of 300 to 500 are good. Words with counts of 500 to 1,000 are great (maybe). Count here means how many times per month the term has been searched on.

A good rule of thumb is to pick terms that have KEI (keyword effectiveness Index) of 10 or greater. KEI is a large potentially complex topic, fortunately all you need to focus on is knowing that the higher the index the easier the term will be to optimize. In other words a high demand search term with not too many competing websites will receive a higher KEI than a high demand search term with many, many competing websites.

You need to focus on keywords that are in demand, yet not so competitive that ranking in the top 3 pages in the Yahoo!, MSN and Google will be out of reach.

I must stress going through the process of offline optimization using poor keywords is useless. They should be specific enough to get targeted traffic but not so obscure that no one is searching those terms. If you optimize your website using poorly chosen keywords, your end result may be increased online traffic, but not bringing the specific type of visitor you had in mind, so it is very critical to get this right, all your other optimization efforts are influenced by the initial keyword terms you ultimately decide on.