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What is the secret to free traffic? Telling the search engines and your future visitors what they want to hear!

It sounds like a Catch-22. After all, if you have no traffic then how can you deliver your message to the search engines and potential customers? There is actually a pretty simple answer to that complex problem. Keywords are the secret to free traffic.

One of my sites has been around for years. I used to publish an ezine of the same name but that ezine was folded into another publication two years ago. All that site consists of is a blog with pages of trivia content. It is not a huge site and it is not updated very often. I do very little to promote it. And yet every day it brings in over 200 visitors who contribute to my income by subscribing to the new trivia publication and supporting my advertising partners. This traffic is free because it is generated by search engines. This site generates free money for me every day and the only marketing technique I use is keyword optimization.

If you properly choose keywords that your target audience regularly searches for and optimize your web site for those keywords then you will see an increase in traffic. A simple one hour investment of your time could reap dramatic results.

Many internet marketers spend time generating a list of keywords they want to target but they do not do the basic research to make sure people are actually using those keywords. It is useless to optimize your site for a set of keywords that generate no traffic. There are a number of keyword suggestion tools around but the best not only give you a list of keywords but also tell you how many people are searching for those words or terms. My favorite keyword suggestion tool can be found at http://establishyourepresence.com/?page_id=3. Simply type in the basic word or term that you would like to target then hit the enter key.

You will receive results for both Wordtracker and Overture. I always study the Overture list but tend to base my own keyword choices on the Wordtracker results. Overture gives you the total number of times a search query has been entered into a search engines within the Overture network (including Yahoo, AltaVista and MSN) and can generate some duplicates. On the other hand Wordtracker gets its figure from entries made on meta search engines (such as Metacrawler and Dogpile) that query all the major engines simultaneously and sorts out the duplications.

Depending on the results you receive you may need to experiment with different words and combinations until you arrive at an audience size that will meet your needs. Do not simply jump at the top term as that may well be a highly competitive market. Sometimes you can achieve better results for your site by aiming a bit lower down the list--especially if there are good results for a longer keyword phrase. It is often difficult to get within the top search engine results for competitive one or two word keyword terms but you can place well with a longer phrase that is not as highly targeted by competitors.

Once you have your keyword phrase selected you must optimize your site. Make sure the phrase is reflected in your title bar, alt tags (with your logo, for example), top headline for the page, and once within the text of your page. Do not go crazy and stuff the keyword in every nook and cranny of your site. Keyword stuffing can often have negative effects on search engine results and may even get your site banned by some search engines. Simply making sure the keyword is included in these key positions will be sufficient for basic keyword optimization.

Selecting the right keywords and including those keywords in key positions within your web site will have a dramatic result on your traffic.