The world wide web is a highly competitive market. Companies vie for the attention of billions of internet users in the search for better 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 phenomenal.

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   website traffic requires  a plan and  regular effort. The rewards are definitely 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 originated 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 subject 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 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 to 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 spread bad news even faster than they spread good news, so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.

One of the keys to getting good rankings within the search engines is to determine how easy or how hard it will be to rank for a certain keyword phrase.

Oftentimes you’ll have a great keyword that you want to use on your site only to find out that you’re up against millions of competitors.

Or are you?

What I’m about to show you is A) completely free and B) will help you determine just exactly how easy or hard it will be to rank for a specific keyword phrase.

As an example, I’ll use the phrase that this post is about which is “Increase Website Traffic”.

If I head on over to Google and search on this phrase I see that I’m up against over 14 million websites.

Now at first glance that looks pretty darn competitive.  But, what I’m going to show you now is a way to determine just exactly how competitive that competition is really. Just because there’s over 14 million sites competing for that phrase doesn’t mean that all of those sites are of high quality or that they’ve used some very basic SEO techniques in order to be listed there.

To do that, I’m going to use a free tool called Traffic Travis.  You can download it for free by clicking this link.

Once you’ve downloaded the software and have it installed, open it up and click on “analyze keyword” under SEO analysis.

Next, enter in the phrase you want to rank for.  In this case, again, I’ll use “increase website traffic”.  Next, choose the location that you want to research.  I’m in the United States so I’ll keep it at it’s default level.  If you market to Australia for example, then you’d choose “Australia” and so on.

Finally click Analyze.

Traffic travis will go out and find the top 20 websites that appear in the search results along with a variety of information about those sites.

If there’s a checkmark it means “Yes”.  If there’s a red X it means “No”.

Once Traffic Travis is done analyzing your keyword it will give you an overall score for the keyword phrase.  From Difficult to Easy.  The more stars there are listed, the easier it will be to rank your site for the keyword you just searched on.

So if you remember, in the case of our keyword phrase of “increase web site traffic” Traffic Travis tells us that it will be relatively easy to rank well for this site – even though we’re up against over 14 million competitors.

The only thing we have to do is to be sure that we cover all of the bases that other web pages did not.

For example, a vast majority of these pages aren’t using the keyword phrase in the title of their web pages.  They’re also not using it in their descriptions or in an H1 tag on their site.  So we know that by being sure that we do, we vastly increase our chances of ranking better than these other sites.

The site in the second position has 124 backlinks to that web page.  If we can get close to or better than the same number of backlinks, we can increase the likelihood of our site getting ranked better even further.

Furthermore, if we can gather up some .edu and .gov domains to link to that page, this will even further increase our chances.

So there’s a quick tip on how to use this free software in order to quickly determine how easy it will be to rank well for a keyword phrase.

Now, Traffic Travis does have a premium version available which lets you track domains and keywords, etc., but for this purpose, you do not have to have the premium license to do so.

So the next time you think you’re up against a lot of competition and just simply couldn’t rank well for a keyword phrase, run it through Traffic Travis’ SEO analysis tool first to see what your competition really looks like.