In order to improve a website's page ranking and ultimately increase traffic, the basic rules and logic of search engine ranking need to be taken into consideration, namely the relevancy and form of the content, and the number of visitors and links, which indicate the site's popularity.

However, a gentle balance is required in order to optimize your position in search engine results, because the search engine's algorithms and crawlers have become so sophisticated that they can detect even the very subtle methods of "spamming" a website with content and links. The most efficient "white hat" method of getting around this problem seems to be complying with the search engine's requirements, i.e. writing and linking a website or directory which truly serves the visitors.

A few of the basic guidelines to successful SEO:

* New content is one of the most valuable resources in the web. The content of the website must be relevant, coherent and exclusive to its location.

* The website's interface must be usable and convenient; including helpful features such a site index, a Q&A page and means of contacting the administrators for tech support.

* The links to and from the site must be of reasonable quantity and high quality, meaning they link to and from sites with similar relevancy and high page ranking. Using a free link directory can easily do this.

* Web crawlers also analyze the site's design and graphical aids, evaluating the work put into the website as a part of its relevancy.

Since links between sites are what actually make up the internet, and are the means of search engine's crawlers of exploring and noticing new websites, smart and careful linking can be the key to dramatically boosting a site's traffic and page ranking. In 2006 Google directory and boot revised the way their algorithm evaluates links, and many sites with high ranking which were actually "link farms", plummeted in search engine results. The location of a link within a body of text, the relevance of the surrounding text, the title of the link word, and the location to which the link word points now have more influence on page ranking. This has prompted the creation of many link directories and article directory which are content-based websites, to which any visitor with a website may submit articles and link words or phrases from the article to his/her website, either for free or in exchange for payment. For example, a person who owns a site that supplies gardening equipment can post an article about gardening, and link the word "water" from the article to an inner-page on his/her website which discusses irrigation systems. When done properly, this method has a good chance of increasing page ranking by following the SEO guidelines: quality, hand-picked, relevant link words, surrounded by relevant text, linking to relevant content in the target website.