The world wide web is a highly competitive market. Companies vie for the attention of billions of internet users in the search for higher revenue. A lynch pin to the internet marketing war is the search engine.

Search engines are internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are of course Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is fantastic.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and placement, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methos of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are (PPC) pay-per-click, adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

Getting   or trying to increase   traffic to my website requires  a plan and  effort. The rewards are well worth it.

Organic searches are searches conducted by web users in a search engine that is free from solicitations. A study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases came from organic searches versus paid online ads.

This has made SEO much more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad but a method of intrinsically improving content.

Here are a few tips on improving content for a much more improved result in organic searches:

1.    Expertise. Follow your strengths. Sites you set up must be on topics you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

2.    Plan the site. A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

3.    Research. Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

4.    Decide on important keywords. Decide on the most important keywords to use for your sight. Include these keywords in the metatags, copy page, page title, and file names.

5.    The Search Engine is your friend. Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.

6.    Focus. Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The typical rule is one topic per page.

7.    Join the directories. Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may shoot through the roof. Of course, make sure you know what you are talking about.

8.    Start a linking campaign. A most effective SEO method. This is a must do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their sites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of its sites by the number of sites linked to it. 

9.    Repetition is the key to victory. Keep repeating the above tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

In the world of search engine optimization, content matters a lot. If a site has amateur or worse falsified information, fewer and fewer visitors will want to visit it. They will even spread bad news faster than good news so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.

The search engines look very favorably on websites that have an incoming link from a prominent website, where that website does not link back to the other site (This is not surprisingly called a one way link). It’s also known more commonly as a backlink.
The search engines as a rule give less importance to a website involved in two way linking (where both websites link to each other) since this has been abused so much in the past by webmasters seeking to achieve high search engine rankings.

There is still a benefit with two way links especially if you are linking to a prominent site so if your only choice to link to a prominent website is by linking back to them from your website, by all means do it. Just remember if you can get them to link back to only you (one way link) it will be more beneficial to your search engine rankings.

Remember that the website you are linking to (or getting one way links from) should have content related to the content on your website.

Take your time when working on your traffic to web site plan. It pays to do some careful research first as a further way to move your online business forward quickly. The rewards are definitely worth it.

One way links are by far the best way to boost up your rankings in the search engines, ultimately bringing more traffic as more people find your website in the search engine results.

The more “important” (from the point of view of the search engines) the site that is linking to you is, the better, and this is what separates the men from the boys in relation to search engine rankings.

One good way to get the ball rolling is to submit articles to article directories (see the Articles Directory article for specific information). The key here is to make sure the article directory you are submitting has itself got a good page ranking with Google.

It’s very important to ensure that your one-way links have related content to your site. Even if it’s coming from a high ranking page, if your incoming link is from a website selling cars, and your selling flowers on your website, it’s unlikely to help you much. If however your site was all about car tyres then the link would be far more likely to provide a benefit to you in search engine rankings.

The more one-way links you can get from relevant, trusted (in the eyes of the search engines) and quality content sites the better. Remember that a single quality one way link will probably provide more of a benefit to your website than be 20-30 low quality links (un-trusted, sub-quality, not entirely relevant content to your website, or combinations of these problems).

The other thing you will definitely want to do is to mix-up your anchor text from these one-way links (Anchor text is the text shown on screen for a link to your website).

Wherever possible you will want to try and control what is in the anchor text on these sites (obviously this will not be possible some times because it’s not your website, however I’ve found many web masters are happy to help).

You definitely don’t want to have the same anchor text for many incoming links from many websites as this can set a red flag to the search engines, who may well rate your website less importance because they believe you may be manipulating the results (I’m not saying that the anchor text for every one way link needs to be unique, just that you should ensure you have a number of combination’s of them in use).

You want to have your best keyword phrases in use with your incoming links, but use as much variation as possible and even just some regular links (just your domain name in the anchor text) will help keeping things natural.

The other thing you want to do is be sure to not always link to your root directory of your website, but rather directly to articles, etc. This allows your incoming link to be targeted for a particular page.

For example with my site I have submitted articles to various article directories that are a subset of a more comprehensive article. In this case I’ve chosen to link from the article directory article direct to the more compressive article on my website. I’ve also ensured that the article is not just a duplicate, since search engines dislike duplicate content and will mark down your websites importance if duplicate content is found.

Of course one way links to your website will not only boost your website’s search engine rankings, but it will also bring traffic to your site.

Start slowly and build up the links over time, you will find your likely to get far better results doing it this way, and that it’s also more likely that your great search engine rankings are likely to “stick” in the future.

Here is another fantastic way to get your name “out-there” and get people visiting your website.

PodCasting!

Podcasting is Audio (and/or Video) that you create on your computer (or via other means, and then load onto your computer) that you then share with other people to listen and/or view.

There are large numbers of Podcasting sites that allow you to upload your audio or video presentation, and then attach a description and information about the presentation. Once this is done, people who visit these podcast sites can “find” your podcast and hopefully if it is interesting enough to them, they will subscribe to your “feed” (similar to a mailing list, but for audio/video) and then be automatically notified whenever you release a new audio or video.

Now generally the “feed” is not controlled by you (unlike a regular mailing list) but rather is controlled by the podcast directory and a podcast “reader” which is software (often free) that you can use to automatically check whether new content is available for your selected “feeds” and to then get downloaded automatically.

You can then watch or listen to the downloaded presentation at your leisure, copy to your iPod, etc. it’s really fairly cool.

One of the biggest names in PodCasting is iTunes. No doubt you’ve heard of iTunes and maybe wonder what it is. iTunes is software that is supplied by Apple (the Mac people) that you can download for free and it will manage all your podcast “feeds” as well as your music and video collection on your computer, and even allow you to buy music (and podcasts) via it’s iTunes store.

Apple have versions of iTunes for both Windows and Mac and it is completely free to download.

Now iTunes is big business, ten of thousands of people download stuff from it every day, so this is probably the first site you want to try and get your podcast listed on.

Many people claim to be experts in the area of targeted website traffic. We suggest you do some careful research yourself first before jumping in.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, first things first, lets discuss what you could be putting into the audio / video.

If your like me, and have a great face for radio, don’t despair. You don’t necessarily need to produce video content, audio is perfectly acceptable for many subscribers, as it’s something you can do (listen to) anywhere (although with video iPods available these days this is also true for Video).

First and foremost you presentation should be adding value to your listeners/viewers. A hard sell sales presentation won’t be worth much to listeners/viewers (at least probably not to those who’s first experience of you is via the audio/video), rather it should be quality relevant content that will appeal to listeners with an interest in your niche market.

Bear in mind that it’s highly likely that when you upload a presentation for inclusion in iTunes, it will be reviewed manually by a human, and if it’s just a hyped up call to action to buy something chances are they may not approve it for inclusion. And even if they did approve it, listeners are going to be turned off when they hear it especially if you have not previously built up a relationship with them.

I suggest an interview is a great idea for a podcast. Put together a set of questions and answers to common problems that you “solve” on your website, and have some one interview you. Save the audio file and then upload to iTunes!

Another idea (once you get a few podcasts completed) is an overview of your product or services, but again not a hard sell, but a detailed list of what you can do or case studies on how you have helped other customers previously.

Just remember it needs to be interesting to listen to, so make sure you target it to your customers needs and to be solving problems that your potential customers may be facing.

You may find iTunes will want a series of podcasts before adding you to their directory, so it would be a good idea to do 2 or 3 podcasts if possible and then submit them to be included as a group.

If you plan to host your podcasts yourself, be very careful and consider if you have another bandwidth to do so, particularly if your feeds get picked up by lots of people.

Because of the nature of podcasts (audio or video) the files can end up being huge, so It’s very important that you plan this out in advance as you may find once you get successful and have a reasonable number of people listening to your podcasts, that you will be putting your server in meltdown and be running out of quota. This may mean your ISP closes down your website!

Don’t be victim to this, plan for getting bigger from day 1, and assume you are going to be successful and put the right steps in place so you have sufficient bandwidth when things take off.

Either put all your efforts into getting listed in iTunes or other large Podcast sites, or if your going to do it yourself, invest in a reasonable PodCast hosting company who specializes in Podcasts.

A decent alternative to iTunes for hosting your iTunes (especially if your have trouble getting iTunes to actually accept your podcasts is a company called Liberated Syndication. I would suggest you check their website out, they are one of the best out there, and give great value for money and in some cases it’s free.

Remember all podcasters had to start somewhere, and some of the bigger ones actually have paid advertising now (where sponsors pay the podcaster for an advertisement to be placed in the podcast). This could end up to be a really nice little money earner for you as well as provide great value for your listeners.