Every startup website is always faced with the daunting challenge of breaking into the online marketplace, especially when it comes to increasing visibility in the SERPs (search engine results pages). It's a good thing there are some search engine optimization techniques that can help you squeeze through somehow.

If you've done some keyword research on the niche you're aiming to break into, you might have come across a lot of highly-competed keywords. Sometimes, the ideas generated by the Google AdWords Keyword Tool can all be highly-competed ones. When this happens, you might want to try aiming for long-tail keywords instead.

Long-tails are searched terms that are, well, long. For instance, if you're aiming to break into the touchscreens niche, you might search for ideas for the term "touchscreens". If all ideas generated are highly-competed, you might want to aim for terms like "touch screen monitor kiosk" instead. This is an example of a long-tail, which usually has low competition.

Don't be disappointed if your research reveals these terms as having low monthly searches. Since not many people are competing for them, it would much easier to break into the top of the SERPs. That means, you won't have to spend a lot of time for other labor-intensive search engine optimization techniques like link-building to bring in some amount of traffic into your site.

This will allow you to aim for the next keyword right away, get ranked fast, and bring in traffic immediately as well.

If you can still find low-competed terms that are one or two words long, then, by all means, go for them. They usually will have more monthly searches than the long-tails. But be sure you act on them fast. I've seen such terms turning from a classification of low competition to very high competition in just a span of 4 months.

It is always important to get your pages indexed by the search engines as quickly as possible. To get your pages indexed quickly, try to plant backlinks on frequently-updated sites with high Page Ranks. You don't have to plant backlinks in so many sites. One or two will do.

If you stick to these simple search optimization techniques, you can capture small groups of visitors in the shortest possible time to bring in a nice, steady flow of traffic while other competing start-ups are still busy battling it out with the well-established ones.