When I first started out with my internet home business, I spent lots of money on solo ezine ads, PPC ads, and so-called leads. Results were pretty average and not worth the money spent, so I began to look for ways to earn free money online. The idea is to utilize free methods of marketing your web site, such as blogging, article marketing and SEO (or search engine optimization). This means a greater profit yield and often better traffic rates in the long term. So, let's look more closely at SEO.

SEO is simply optimizing your site with the effective placement of relevant keywords and undertaking a linking campaign to increase the number of back-links pointing back to your site. This increases your ranking in the search engines, with the aim being to get on page 1 for your keyword phrase. If you can get on page 1 for your keyword, you will have lots of people clicking on your listing and visiting your site. Provided that you maintain this position, you can earn free money online indefinitely.

The first step in your SEO campaign is keyword research. Grab a pen and paper and write down all the keyword phrases you can think of, that visitors might type into a search engine to get information on your niche. Once you have your list, go to your favorite keyword suggestion tool and start entering your phrases into the tool. Each time you enter a phrase, it will give you a heap of other related keyword phrases as possible options.

I always target low-competition phrases that have had about 1000 searches in the past month. I then enter this phrase into the Google search engine, within inverted commas, to see how many other competing sites there are for this term. I try to aim for less than 100,000 results per phrase.

My strategy is to build a web page around each low-competition keyword phrase (and have lots of phrases). That way, if I can get just 20 visitors from the search engines per day for each page, and have at least 50 pages, this is a total of 1000 visitors per day to my site. To me, this is more achievable than targeting a highly-competitive phrase and working my butt off constantly to maintain a high ranking for that phrase. Now, let's look at on-page and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the work that you do on the actual web page itself. What you need to do is place your keyword phrase in your URL (if possible), in the title tag of the page, in the description tag and in the keywords tag, Then, sprinkle your keywords in the body of the text, in the first and last paragraphs, and make sure that you bold, underline or italicize the keyword phrase to give it more emphasis in the search engines. Don't over-do it though. I aim for about 1 to 2% keyword density on my pages.

Off-page optimization is basically your linking strategy. The more back links you have pointing to your site, generally the higher your ranking with the search engines. Two great ways to increase your links are by submitting your URL to the link directories (preferably with a high PR), and to write and submit articles (with a link pointing back to your site) to quality article directories.

Once you have implemented all the steps of your SEO campaign, you need to keep the momentum going. Keep adding more and more pages to your web site, targeting good keyword phrases, and continue getting more links pointing back to your site. The results and the pay-off are definitely worth it. There's nothing better than getting highly-targeted, free traffic from the search engines and earning free money online.