I will be honest; the title of this article is slightly misleading. You see, in my opinion, the best traffic that money can buy actually doesn't cost anything - it's free! :-)

I am talking of course about the magical traffic that we have all heard of but that only a select few have experienced.....free search engine traffic.

We all know that it is possible to get tons of free traffic from the big search engines - Google, MSN, Yahoo and so on but getting to the top of these engines has always been incredibly tough. Actually, I am being slightly dishonest again. Going back a few years, it was in fact very easy to get a high search engine ranking, you just put a page together, threw in a few meta keywords and a decent page title and scattered your keywords across the text content a bit and that was it. Wait a week or so and bingo, you've got yourself a front page ranking on Google! Ok, it wasn't quite that simple but it wasn't much harder than that.

Nowadays getting to the top of the engines is much harder and even if you do make it to the top, you can be dropped just as quickly if the search engine decides to change the way in which they rank websites.

However, whilst getting your site indexed and ranked in a decent position does take a bit of effort, it isn't impossible, especially if you know what the search engines are looking for. I am no expert on the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but I have studied the subject on a casual basis since I first started online in 1998. I am really a lazy SEO'er and part of the reason for this is that I have spent the time in past optimizing sites, only to have Google (or whoever) suddenly decide that they don't like my site quite as much as they did last week and dropping me way down their rankings. All that lovely free traffic gone overnight :-( I got fed up with this a couple of years ago and vowed never to chase search engine traffic again!

That said, there is nothing quite like top quality, targeted, free traffic and the buzz of getting several hundred (or even thousand) visitors every single day without spending out a single penny can't be beaten. Just think how much it would cost you to buy 500 visitors each day using Google Adwords or similar (and this form of advertising isn't anywhere near as effective as it used to be but that's a story for another day!).

Anyway, back to the point of this article.... It is possible to get very good search engine rankings very quickly IF you follow some basic rules when you build your websites. To illustrate this (and remember, I am no expert), I noticed this week that my new site, SimplyWholesale.co.uk already has several number one (and front page) rankings on Google, MSN and several other smaller search engines! I am even beating eBay on some keywords and phrases :-) Now, bear in mind that this site was launched just two weeks ago. I haven't done any 'major' search engine optimization on it - just the absolute basics. There are hardly any inbound links to the site (seriously, like a dozen absolute maximum) AND none of the search engines have crawled anywhere near the entire site. At the time of writing, Google has indexed just 17 pages out of almost 1500!! Despite this, Google and the other engines are sending me some fairly healthy traffic everyday. Just think how much traffic I could be getting in a few weeks time once the site has been fully indexed?!

So, why am I telling you this? Simple. Because getting good search engine rankings doesn't have to be an impossible task. If you know the basics and apply them to your site, there is no reason why you shouldn't start to see some free traffic coming your way. Now of course, you can't expect to do a bit of work on your site and suddenly rank no.1 on Google for a really competitive search term such as 'earn money online' BUT you don't need to. At the end of the day all you need to do is make sure that your site ranks well for a handful of relevant keywords/phrases and as long as they are words that people are actually searching for, you will see the benefits.

If you don't know how to optimize your website, just visit my forum in the signature link below for lots of hints and tips...

Copyright 2006 Richard Grady