article body: So, you have your website and you know that you want traffic. What would be the point in putting in all that effort to build your website if no one was ever going to see it? You have set up some traffic exchanges and some banner advertising but you were hoping to get some visitors from the search engines without having to do PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, what are you going to do?

Well, in a word (three words actually!), Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. Now there are lots of people and companies out there who try to make this sound a lot more complicated than it is. Their reason for this is simple, if you are a bit worried about it, then you will pay them vast sums of money to do it for you rather than having a go yourself.

Now, I readily admit, that I am no expert on the subject. There may well be some esoteric techniques that these people and companies use that I do not know about. But what I have learned, is that you can do an awful lot for yourself before you even need to think about calling in an expert! I advise that you make a back up of your website before making any alterations so that if you do have a major problem you can restore your original site quickly.

In essence, all SEO is making the search engines crystal clear on what your website is about. This is achieved by carefully choosing ?keywords? i.e., words that describe what your website is about, and ensuring that these keywords are used in the correct places and acceptable regularity throughout your site. Also, the use of ?links? to your site from other, similar topic sites. These ?links? show the search engines that your site is seen as something of an authority on the keywords you have chosen by other websites.

All you need to achieve this is a ?keyword? generator/search tool, a tool to help you create links and a little time to work it all together. (A good guide close to hand is also very useful and you can find many online. I would recommend anything by Brad Callen.) Having chosen your ?keywords? carefully (ideally so there are less than two million competing sites, i.e. sites using the same ?keywords?) ensure that they are in your sites ?meta tags? and your ?title? and the wording on your index page. If you have a logo or image on your index page you can also place your keywords in the text alternative description of these.

Just these few changes and the introduction of some ?links? will greatly improve your position in the search engine results and hence improve your traffic. There are other tricks (obviously!) that you can use and many of them can be found in free guides online. You do need to be aware that over use of your chosen keywords can be detrimental to your sites search engine results ? It is something that they look for and consider ?cheating?

In conclusion, is SEO worth it? In short, YES! You may not want to try it yourself and you may prefer to pay someone to do it for you but you should most definitely get it done if you want to increase your natural traffic.