One of the biggest mistakes beginning online marketers make is believing the process is “build it and they will come”. It simply does not work like that. You can build the most beautiful website with the greatest content, publish it to the Internet, and get no traffic. There is far more to the process of online success in simply building a website.

The key to successful Internet marketing is understanding how to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Notice I said “targeted” traffic; not just any traffic will do. You want visitors coming to your websites who are looking specifically for what you have to offer. The simplest way to guarantee your site receives quality and targeted traffic is by using a process called search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a process Internet marketers use to create their webpages in a way that search engines find attractive. The goal of any Internet marketer is to have their site ranking on the first page of Google search results for specific keywords. There are over 200 different attributes of a website that Google analyzes for page ranking. No one knows what all of these are. However we are aware of the most important ones.

It’s always disappointing to me when someone sends me their website to critique and it’s quite obvious they spent significant time building the site but did so without any knowledge of SEO. All is not lost in this case; they can learn SEO and go back and optimize the pages. However, it’s much easier to perform the optimization along the way.

There are both on-page and off-page SEO strategies that must be applied in order to achieve great placements in the search engines.

On-page SEO deals with such things as having an optimized title tag, well optimized content, intra-linking of the site’s pages, proper alt tags on images, a simple navigation system, site map creation and submission, etc.

Off-page SEO involves getting other sites to link back to your site (we call those backlinks) and also getting what’s called “site activity”. Google places significant importance on the quality and quantity of other websites that have links to your site. All things being equal sites with better backlinks will rank for better in the search engines.

Site activity is a term which describes how much traffic from various sources comes to your website. Some of the quickest ways to increase site activity for a new website are search engine optimization, social media marketing, and video marketing. These will all bring significant amounts of traffic to your website, thus improving Google’s opinion of your site.