Everyone who has a website business wants the same thing – traffic, which leads to sales which leads to profits. The question is: what is the best way to get that traffic?

The easy way is to pay for it via Pay per Click advertising such as Google Adwords. The downside is that this becomes a significant cost for most keywords and the more popular the keywords the more you will pay per click. It’s not unknown for popular keywords to cost upwards of $5 per click and at this rate it’s difficult to turn a profit.

The more difficult way is to ensure that your website appears high in the search engine rankings for your chosen keywords. What this means in practice is that you need to get to the first page of Google and ideally to the top of that page if you truly want to maximise traffic to your site. The difference between the traffic obtained from a first place ranking and that obtained from a 10th place ranking is simply huge and this makes it all the more important to drive your site to as high a position as you possibly can for your chosen keywords.

So how do you ensure that you appear high in the rankings? Most people rightly assume that the number and quality of back-links is important and therefore spend time, money and effort in buying or increasing the number of back-links to their site. Be under no illusion, this is soul destroying work and quite boring for most people which is why they choose to outsource the work.

The best way to gain back-links and move up the rankings is often overlooked, but it’s foolproof, easy and avoids any form of Google penalty or Google slap as it is commonly known. The way is to provide quality content which is relevant, timely and useful to the users of the site. Don’t decry this – Google insists on ensuring that websites provide a useful browsing experience and you might be surprised just how many long tailed keywords a well written article or two presents to the search engines. The real secret is to write for human browsers of your site and not the Googlebot.