Do you need Traffic to your website? Using SEO is by far the best way to generate unlimited free traffic to your site. Sometimes in the rush to promote, webmasters turn to buying traffic or trying to use traffic exchanges to get traffic. These methods are ineffective and can be time consuming and very expensive.

The best traffic is free traffic provided by the search engines. If you use proper SEO and build a good site the search engines will send you more traffic than you dreamed of, here are some tips to help with your SEO.

Build a content rich website

Building a site that has original keyword rich content is the first step. If your site is rarely updated with new content there is little reason for the search engines to visit. It is important to constantly add new content to your site, search engines are constantly looking for something new and they aren't easily fooled. If you simply copy content that is already all over the internet, or use a cookie cutter web page, you will not get traffic from search engines.

Know your keywords

This is probably the single most important step in building your website. Keywords and phrases are basically the terms people enter as search criteria. If you have a site selling widgets try to think of all the terms people would use when looking for your particular type of widget. There are tools available to make this easier Keyword Discovery offers a free tool to research keywords, as does Google. Research keywords and phrases with less competition at first, and then build up to the more popular keywords once you have some momentum.

Once you choose your keywords use them on your site. Use your keywords in your sites URL, home page title, alt image tags and strategically throughout your pages. Keep your keyword concentration around 3 to 5% on your site. Too much, or too little and your SEO will suffer. Remember, searches are always, always, always about content.

Develop quality one way links

One way links pointing to your site are a very important part of SEO. Search engines use links to rank your site. In some ways your linking strategy is, such as PageRank, links to your site are crucial. Every link counts as a vote in favor of your site. The higher the PageRank of the site pointing to you, the more the link counts. PageRank is important in determining wher your site is listed in the search engine results. Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a bad one-way link pointing to your site. Your SEO will not be negatively affected by a link pointing to you if it could, then all you would need to do is create a banned page and start linking to your competition to make them suffer in the rankings.

While incoming links can't hurt you, outgoing links can. If your site points to a site that has been banned by one of the search engines your SEO will suffer. Be careful what sites you link to, there are negative consequences from linking to a bad site. It is a good practice to check all of your link partners at least monthly. Check on your link partners to verify that they are still linking to you and that they are not doing things that could get them banned.


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Rob Emmerson has written extensivly on the subject of SEO. He offers a free SEO course at http://www.theseosecretrevealed.com you can find more tips and tricks at his SEO Blog http://www.robemmerson.com