Have you heard talk of SEO and linking campaigns only to ask "why"? Do you wonder why those pixel ad sites and keyword link sites were so successful? It's all about getting tons of free web site traffic by ranking high in the major Internet search engines, and the one thing you can do to drastically improve your site's search engine ranking.

Search engine optimization (SEO for short) is the process of letting the search engines really see what your site is about to get a high ranking based on how important and relevant your site is. SEO is keyword based and the search engines rank web pages based on keyword searches.

SEO consists of on-page factors and off-page factors.

On-page factors include keyword use in the content of your web page and html tags. Also included is the use of internal page linking. That is linking from one web page to another with a keyword focused link text.

You can get by with just a bit of on-page seo work for your site if you concentrate on off-page factors.

Off-page SEO concerns how many other web sites link to your site and how important those sites are. Even a low importance site link has some value to your site's importance and search engine ranking. But important sites pass on more value to your sites than less important sites do.

Links to your web site can be one-way or two-way reciprocal links. One-way links bring more value to your site's ranking, but reciprocal links are still worth having. A good web site linking strategy would include both one-way and reciprocal links, as many quality links as you can get.

A good source for one-way links to your site is writing and submitting helpful targeted articles online that include links pointing back to your site. This is especially good when you can submit an article resource box with html code so you can include keyword targeted text as the link to your web page. This link text is called an anchor tag.

An important part of your web site linking strategy involves trading links with other related web sites, often called link swaps. The key is to get many link swaps with reputable web sites related to yours. The higher their importance and ranking, the better for your site's value.

In the past it was popular to have an automated software program installed on your web site that would perform link swaps with other web sites with little or no action by you. As Google did one of their famous Internet house cleaning sessions recently, sites that used automated scripts to perform link exchanges were delisted from the Google system.

So make sure you do your link swap pages by hand or use a software tool that runs on your computer and generates link pages for you to upload to your site.

Developing a consistent linking strategy can increase the ranking of your search engine listing by hundreds of spots very quickly. If you only apply a few on-page SEO factors, a strong linking strategy can give your site an advantage over thousands of other sites competing for the same visitors you are.