If you have a website, one of the most important things to do is search engine marketing to help get your website known on the big search engines. The higher your website appears on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your targeted keywords the better. If you're looking to generate some free website traffic it's not difficult to do, you just have to know how to start. Here are 6 search engine marketing tips to help you get where you want to be.

1. Optimize For Your Target Audience

Search engines are looking for pages that suit your audience's needs and answer their questions more than anything. By finding out who your target audience is, you can begin optimizing your keyword use and generating free website traffic the way the search engines want you to.

2. Find The Right Keywords

By doing extensive research to determine the best keywords for your website, you will bring in more free website traffic than planned. You want to use research tools such as Wordtracker, Google adwords, and overture to find out what keywords are best to optimize for your website. After you have compiled a list of the better keywords for your site, then determine what is best for your target audience.

3. Worthy Content

One of the most important search engine marketing tips is to have content that is fresh and rich to interest your visitors. You want to make sure you provide new and intriguing content to your visitor's that includes your target keywords. By doing so you will find that you are getting more of a returning visitor base.

4. Link Trading

In order to get free website traffic you have to trade links with other websites. Depending on the search engines you are looking at, some want quality links that are relevant to your website whereas search engines like Google are looking more for a site that contains a large quantity of links. Do some research to determine what is going to get you more traffic to your website. Either way, the better your website is the more people will want to link to your site without you having to ask.

5. Avoid Lots Of Graphic

If you want to be high on the search engines and begin receiving free website traffic, try to stay away from large banners and flashing animations. That's not to say you shouldn't use a couple here and there, but content is what is going to get you more traffic than anything. Using a large number of graphics just clutters the page without informing your visitors about anything they want to know.

6. Article Writing

Article writing is one of the best search engine marketing tools. By writing articles you can optimize your targeted keywords, inform readers about your website in a few sentences, and give them your link to your website. After writing articles, you can submit them to article directories or place links to your article on blogs and in forums to spread the word.

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