If you're a webmaster, you know you need to bring website traffic in order to succeed. You might be selling your own products, or you're an affiliate for others, or you're building your lists and so want to capture email addresses. Whatever your site's function, you will know that nothing is going to transpire unless you bring website traffic.

There are many ways to undertake promotion with a view to bringing traffic to your website. One of the most effective is to try and get in the top ten positions of Google, Yahoo and other search engines. This has the added advantage of being free traffic, as opposed to say, pay per click or advertising.

However, attempting to get your website returned on the first page of search engines is very ambitious. It means that you will have to optimize your web pages extremely efficiently for your chosen keywords and key phrases. Plus, you will be competing against thousands or possibly millions of other websites where the webmasters are also trying to get their sites high up in search returns.

Having said this, it can be done. Search engine optimization is indeed one activity in which the individual webmaster can compete more or less on an equal footing with the corporates. In fact, the ?one man band? webmaster has a great advantage in that he or she can usually make instant tweaks to their websites in order to improve their site optimization.

Whilst it can be difficult to get on the first page of Google, Yahoo and the rest, you will find lots of resources are available, many free, to assist you in achieving this objective.

For example, I did a search on Google for - optimize website free resources ? and it came back with over 68 million hits! So there's plenty of assistance out there. Maybe too much to know where to start.

If you're looking for help in optimizing your website, here are a selection of resources which I have found particularly useful:

http://www.sitereportcard.com

Free website analysis, optimization and promotion reports.

http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/free-seo-tools.html

You will find useful optimization free tools here.

http://www.spiderhelp.com/optimize/

An excellent checklist covering the elements of optimizing your site.

These sites will be a good starting point for you if you're looking for that ultimate of traffic objectives ? to appear in a top ten position on the search engines.

If you use these resources wisely and effectively, you will find that there are many ways to bring traffic to your website.