The amazing thing about doing business on the internet is that you are able to control, to a certain degree, the prospects that will visit your website.

Providing you own your online home business and therefore have your own domain you will have access to the source code, which will enable you to optimize your website for the search engines.

During the optimization process you will select your title, description and keywords that are relevant to the content of your website. In this way you are able to attract prospects that are looking for exactly what your website has to offer.

There is no point in adding misleading keywords and information to your website as this will only attract prospects that will open your site only to find it is not what they were looking for and close the browser.

You can optimize your site yourself by taking the time to learn html and reading SEO ebooks and using free software that is available. Join an SEO forum and request a review of your site from the experts in that forum. You can gain a great deal of help this way.

Once you are satisfied with the on-site optimization of your website it is time to move on to the off-site optimization.

Off-site optimization is the exciting part of internet marketing where you will see progress in leaps and bounds as long as you have done the on-site optimization correctly.

You need your site now to get indexed by the major search engines and it is advisable to submit by hand to the Google, Yahoo and MSN. Additionally, for Google, open a Google Webmaster account, generate a sitemap, insert the code in the html of your website and submit the url of your sitemap to Google from within your Webmaster account.

One-way backlinks are the next major part of off-site optimization. You need to spend time gathering links that point back to your site and this you can do in a number of ways.

Backlinks are one of the main factors that determine your website`s position in the search results. Your website will start appearing higher and higher in the search results as you gather more links pointing back to your website.

Article marketing is one of the simplest and cheapest ways to gather genuine links pointing back to your site. You ideally need to write articles about the theme of your website and optimize the articles for keywords that you are using in your website. Use the keywords in the title and body of your article and very importantly anchor your keyword text and url in the author`s resource box. Submit your articles to as many article directories as possible and then start writing your next article and keep this process going. You will be amazed at the results.

Join forums that relate to your business, not only so you can pick up inspiration and great ideas for your online home business, but also so you can contribute constructively and regularly in your field of expertise which will generate targeted prospects. With your keywords anchored in the text in your signature you will also be generating valuable links pointing back to your site.

Another idea to generate backlinks is to submit your website to the web directories. Also make this an ongoing practice. Some directories require a reciprocal link others will charge a fee, but look for high page ranking directories and submit your website for inclusion in the directory.

All these ideas of generating targeted prospects to your online home business are free if you take the time to do the work yourself.

It takes time to build one-way links, so be patient as you will be handsomely rewarded when your website starts appearing on page 1 of the search results for your chosen keywords.

When an online visitor types your keyword phrase into the search box causing your online home business site to appear high in the search results he immediately converts to a targeted prospect, as he is looking for exactly what your online home business site has to offer.