If you have a business website you will know that there is no such thing as too much traffic (assuming, of course, that your intention is to make a profit). The majority of targeted traffic comes via search engines either as a sponsored result through pay per click (PPC) advertising or through placement in the search engines' organic results. To get a decent amount of free search engine traffic to your website, you need to get your site listed as high as possible in the organic search results. This means preferably on page one and definitely within the first three pages.

Here are four things to keep in mind when you are trying to get your website listed in a high position in the search engines.

Content Is King

You will undoubtedly have heard that before: it's one of the things the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts agree upon. Note, however, it is not just any old content: the search engines love good original content. If you build a website by filling it with articles that appear on hundreds of other websites, your site might eventually get listed by the search engines but it won't appear high up in the listings, it will probably be ranked so far down, no human visitor will ever set eyes on it. You need to write your own articles or, if you are unable to do this, pay a ghost writer to write articles for you.

Quality Links Improve Status

Note that you need "quality" links to improve your website's standing with the search engines. It is a waste of time to buy links or create an obvious "link farm" swapping links with all and sundry. Writing articles helps here also. An excellent way of obtaining one way links back to your website is by writing your own articles (or having them ghost-written) and submitting them to article directories. Publishing articles is arguably the best way of obtaining links. Exchanging links with other websites is still useful but reciprocal links do not impress Google and, all too often, where Google goes the other search engines follow.

Keywords Count

If you target the wrong keywords, you will be making life harder for yourself and setting yourself up to fail from the start. Before you rush in to try to stake a claim to number 1 position with a hugely popular keyword, take a look at the competition. If a great big established website has been sitting at number 1 for aeons, do you think your little newbie site has what it takes to topple the champ? Unlikely! You probably won't even stand a chance of getting in the first ten pages within the foreseeable future if the keyword is really popular. Far better to do some careful research and find keywords that are not only relevant to your website content but also have fewer sites competing for the traffic. For listings to really count, your website needs to be ranked within the first three pages of a search result and the fewer sites there are in competition, the greater your chance is of getting your website into a good position.

Change Is Good

Keep adding fresh content to your website and also check that your links all work. Nothing upsets the search engine bots more that stale content and broken links. If your website becomes stagnant it will sink into oblivion and this will probably be a sudden massive plunge rather than a slow slide down into obscurity. Don't be afraid to remove content that becomes outdated or is no longer strictly relevant to your website. A website can change direction quite dramatically as it grows, so be on the lookout for redundant content and get rid of it. The bots will like this tidying up as much as they like fresh content.

Getting your website high ranking in the search engines takes time and more than a little effort but it is worth it: it is deeply satisfying to know that your website is getting visitors through your own SEO efforts. The fact that this traffic is free is also heart-warming.