One of the most common needs of site owners is traffic. Without traffic a website barely exists, and we shouldn’t even talk about profit. We will try to see here the most important steps to attract targeted traffic. Beginners in internet usually make the mistake to want any kind of traffic and therefore they get themselves into programs that offer tens of thousands of hits for their site, but most of them are blind hits. And after this experience they don’t manage a thing and they give up the idea they could ever do something.
For those who try to learn from they experience, they have to come to the conclusion that the only type of traffic they need is targeted traffic. They need real interested visitors, not visitors forced by a traffic generating system to enter their site.
So, let’s go over the five steps:

1. Affiliate programs. These programs consist of giving part of your profit to those who help you sell. In time you can get a true army of promoters that will advertise for you. This is done not just for internet sites; it is also done in real life, by big companies.

2. Adding content Adding high quality content to your site you will make an ideal instrument to always increase traffic. Search engines provide the highest position to the most relevant site for the given keyword. So your content must be well thought, containing the terms you are selling or proving many times, but being still easy to read.

3. Creating content materials While you search for material to add to your site, others are searching for sites that publish content. Creating some article or newsletter will allow you to add it immediately to your site, but you can also give it to others along with a link to your site.

4. Publishing through Enzines A good way to achieve a number of loyal visitors is to occasionally announce everyone that chooses to be announced of news and new products. Publishing quality information in the sent emails will give a boost to your credibility and you will build a serious amount of loyal visitors.

5. Pay per Click Search Engines When using such engines, you will pay to increase your rank for various keywords used in searches. If the keywords are chosen properly, you will be paying only for the visitors your are interested in.

Search Engine optimization is of two kinds, Organic and Mechanical. Organic SEO depends on manual or natural ways of optimizing a website and takes more time resulting in long lasting results. Mechanical SEO use software i.e. seo tools to optimize a website. It takes less time but results have a shorter shelf life.

SEO tools are numerous. They are available for keyword verification checking and suggestions, link popularity checks, meta tag optimization, search saturation checking, back link building, search engine ranking etc.

The seo tools are being extensively used today to optimize websites. In the fiercely competitive industries it is very important to be on top of Google, Yahoo or any other search engine rankings to tap targeted audience. This greatly helps to sustain, grow and expand your business through your website.

Each category of seo tools in turn has number of software developed by different companies. It is relevant to know which are good before you embark upon using one. Almost all of them have demo versions available for free download. You can always try them out before narrowing your options and buying the best. Remember, SEO tools are only tools; one should use them with a lot of prudence lest the search engines black list you.

Article directories are websites that house free articles. These articles are usually put there by whoever owns the copyright to them as a promotion method. Each article has the owners byline placed under it so that those who eventually read the article will know who wrote it (or at least who owns it) and will be able to get in contact with or visit their website for further information.

Articles directories are a great place to put your articles so that they will make you money. By using this method, people who are interested in your product or service will see your article, view you as an expert in the subject, and will visit your website. Even if you cannot write or do not have any knowledge on the subject on which you are promoting (for example for you run an affiliate website), you can always hire a writer to do the work for you. Getting quality articles written will be expensive up front, but they will pay for themselves in no time, either through affiliate sales or selling your own services, and everything from then on is pure profit.

Let’s take a real life example. Imagine that you are an accountant working from home. You write an article on an accounting topic and place it on various article directories. Those who are looking for the subject you wrote about will read your article, see that you have the knowledge and skill that is needed to do a job for them, and visit your website or contact you via e-mail. Your article just gained you a new client who may use your services regularly, but will definitely give you a nice profit at least once.

Furthermore, since you have posted it on a free article directory, others who have affiliate websites about accounting will inevitably use your article for their website. Since they must attach your byline to it, this will bring you even more exposure for every website that re-posts your article. This because you will be benefiting of off the traffic that they get to their website.

There are numerous article directories out there for you to utilize. Your bet best is to put a copy of each of your articles on every one for maximum exposure. It will eventually help to bring more traffic and customers to your website, which will lead to new orders and more profit.

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

Search Engine Optimization: What Not to Do.
Most internet marketers understand the importance of a well optimized site. In fact it is the goal of most internet marketers to rank highly for keywords relevant to their website. Successful search engine optimization and the subsequent high rankings that it brings, allows webmasters to drive laser targeted traffic to their sites without having to spend a dime. The problem is that most people are not sure about how to get their sites ranked well. Perhaps, worst yet, they don’t know what not to do, which can results in penalties from the search engines. This article will provide some guidelines on things to avoid when you are looking to optimize your site for the search engines.

SEO: What Not To Do

1. Never Update Your Site: Updating your website is very important to achieving high search engine rankings. If you want your site to stay on page 1000 of Google for your keyword, let it die by never updating it or adding new pages to it.


2. Repeat The Same Keyword Over and Over: It is now harder then ever to achieve high rankings by simply repeating your keywords over and over in your web copy. The search engines have wised up to it. They view it as keyword stuffing and will penalize your website for it. Search engines want their visitors to be able to find websites that will provide real value. If their visitors only find junk sites, created for the search engines, their reputation suffers and people will begin to look elsewhere for the information that they need. This would be bad for everyone.

Many of the search engines are using Latent Semantic Indexing to rank websites. This is simply making sure that your website has related keywords. For example if your site is about dogs and you are looking to get your site ranked for the keyword “dog training,” the search engines would scan your site for related keywords like, “Doberman,” “puppy” and “house training, etc.”

3. Don’t Worry About Incoming Links: Incoming links will make or break your attempts at achieving high search engine rankings. The worst thing that you can do is to not work hard to get incoming links. There are tons of available and free ways to get great links. Article and blog directories, social networking and book-marking sites are great places to begin.


4. Rely Solely on Search Engine Optimization: While successful, search engine optimization can be a fantastic thing, it would not be wise to put all of your eggs in the SEO basket. This is because search engines change and what they want in a website does as well. Also, there will be many people competing against you for the same keywords that you are targeting. Your website can be in the top five one day and then no where to be found the next. This can be devastating to your bottom line. Therefore, it is wise to diversify your traffic sources. Use both paid and free methods.

5. Do What Worked Five Years Ago: The one thing that does hold true regarding the internet is that things will change. Methods that would have sky rocketed your website up the search engines five years ago may no longer work today. That is why it is more important than ever, to keep updated and better yet, one step ahead, of any changes that may potentially affect your business.

Optimizing your website or blog for the search engines is a really great way to get some free traffic. And while many people are confused about the proper way to optimize their website, the formula is really pretty simple and straight forward. You need to have the proper tags, update your site consistently, perform some on-page optimization and most importantly, get incoming links. The persons who commit to this formula, will have the most success with the search engines.

1. Proper Tags: You will need to be sure that your site or blog has optimized meta, description and header tags. This simply means that these tags should include the keywords that you are looking to get ranked for. Don’t stuff them, just make sure that they are there.


2. Update Your Site: The search engines will reward your site if you update it consistently. A couple of times a week is good. If you have a blog, you should try to post to it everyday. It doesn’t have to be an incredibly long post, but you do need to continually add to it.


3. On Page Optimization: On page optimization is still important when trying to achieve high search engine rankings. Be sure to place your keyword at the very beginning of the web page and also throughout the page and at the very end. Again, don’t add your keyword over and over. The search engines are rewarding sites that provide value to the reader. You also want to be sure to use words that are related to your main keyword.

For example, if you are trying to get ranked for the keyword “weight loss,” be sure that words like “diet,” “lose 10 pounds” or “lose weight” appear in your text. Because many search engines are incorporating Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) into how they rank websites, it is important the you stay cognizant of it. LSI is meant to counter keyword stuffing by ensuring that related keywords occur in any web copy.


4. Incoming Links: Incoming links are probably the most important part of search engine optimization. Incoming links are like votes to the quality of your website. The rational behind this is that you must have a really great site, if it is receiving lots of “votes” or incoming links. You can get links from a number of different places. Other websites, article directories, blogs, social book marking and networking sites are good places to begin.

Search optimization is a great way to drive free and targeted traffic to your website. And although the formula to achieve good rankings is quite simple, the competition is fierce. Everyone wants those top spots because it means 100% profit. For this reason, you should not totally rely on SEO to market your website or blog. Instead, have a more well-rounded plan that includes both free and paid advertising options. You may want to consider driving traffic to your website by writing articles, using forums and even pay-per-click. It will help to safeguard your business. You could be in the top 10 in Google one day and be gone the next. So it is best to diversify your advertising methods.