Marketing your online business should start with search engine optimization (SEO); the process of including keywords or phrases that help your website rank well with search engines. SEO is oftentimes misunderstood and many overlook or simply ignore it due to not understanding how easy it can be.

Here are six places you can incorporate keywords into your website.

Metas – While these are not big factors in search engine ranking anymore, they do still hold weight and only take seconds to do so there’s simply no reason not to include them. Meta tags are inserted keyword into the header of individual web pages and essentially give search engines a brief summary of what the content is about.

– Meta keywords are key words or phrases used to describe the content on the page. A single web page may have up to a dozen meta keywords, depending on what the content is about.

– Meta descriptions on the other hand are short summaries of what the page is about. These summaries are shown in search engines and encourage people to visit your page.

Content – Search engines want to see high quality, relative content. When you provide this along with focused keywords, you’ll find your search ranking increase. The more relevant content you add, the higher your site will climb. You can add keywords to your headlines, subheadings, first and last paragraphs and even sprinkled out within the content as long as they fit naturally. You only need to include them once or twice so don’t stuff your content with keywords.

Internal Linking – Keywords often naturally fit in website navigation and when linking one web page to another. This internal linking can give your SEO a quick boost.

URLs – Web page urls not only give you a place to add your keywords but they also allow you to provide easy-to-read links for your visitors. If you’ve been online for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen web pages that look something like this:

http://sitename.com/category/789204/

This is simply a waste of usable SEO space. Instead, your urls should be named something related to the content such as:

http://sitename.com/category/chocolate-covered-peanut-recipe/

Product Images – Often overlooked, these little gems are a great way to boost your SEO. Search engines not only look at content, they also look at images. So instead of calling your image ‘silver truck’ add a key word or phrase that describes the image and related content such as "2013 silver Toyota Tundra king cab truck". By adding a description, your image and resulting page will now be picked up when anyone searches for a 2013 Toyota Tundra or even a Toyota Tundra king cab.

SEO doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming. You simply need to choose your keywords or keyword phrases and then add them into the places above.