Publishers use the internet for a variety of things. However, unless you attract traffic to your website your efforts are completely wasted. Search engine optimization is the best way of attracking consistent and regular traffic to your site in the long-term. It’s surprisingly easy to achieve if you know how.

The first step is targetting specific low competition keywords – i.e. keywords with a high enough search volume to be of interest, but with low amounts of competition to give you a reasonable chance of getting listed in the first page. You can do this using the free Google Keyword research tool to establish the amount of traffic that you’ll get followed by a Google search (in speech markets) to find out the number of competing pages. However, I find that this doesn’t work too well. Firstly it’s very time consuming. Secondly, when doing this you have no visibility of the SEO of the competing pages which is a very significant in establishing the feasibility of a good search engine ranking.

For my keyword research I use just one tool called MicroNicheFinder. It pulls a lot of data from Google. However, what makes it so helpful is that it weighs up numerous factors including both the number of competing sites and the SEO of competing sites. Keywords that you stand an excellent opportunity of competing for are highlighted in green. It’s beautifully simple yet so incredibly effective.

The other critical aspect for ranking well in the search engines is new, regular, keyword rich, unique content. Blogging is great for this and the search engines love them. It’s particularly important to regularly update the content of a site at the start of its life to catch the attention of the search engines.

Back links are also vital to a good ranking and the search engines are looking for a consistent increases with time. Article marketing is great for this and you can create anchor links in your resource box using your target keywords. The huge downside to article marketing is that (if done manually) you’re looking at weeks and weeks of work to create multiple versions and submit to different sites. However, I use a great, paid tool called Unique Article Wizard which make the process about a thousands times easier. Not only does it create unique versions of your article, it also submits the article on your behalf. Using this tool you can literally generate thousands of back links with very little effort at all. Based on my own experiences this is remarkably effective.

Now, the above covers getting high numbers of back links. However, the resulting back links are not always on high page rank sites. As the search engines also place a lot of importance on the quality of your back links this is also another important consideration if you want to rank well. To do this I use another paid tool called EasyBacklinker which is (as far as I know) the only way of easily finding high page rank sites which you can add a do follow (this is very important) back link. I’m affraid that I don’t know of any free way of hunting down these sites so would recommend it if you can afford it (it’s not too expensive).

Based on my experiences this is all that you need to do to get a high ranking for a given keyword. Sure, it takes time. But it’s really worth it. Generally speaking a lot of people can’t be bothered with thorough SEO because it’s requires some effort. However, if you’re prepared to put in the time then you will rank well and get boat loads of free traffic.

If you’re a little impatient and want immediate free traffic then publish articles on using EzineArticles, Squidoo and Hubpages. These resullt in immediate visits to your site while you wait for search engine rank to improve. As an added bonus you do of course generate additional back links.