Once you have a well-designed site that's search engine friendly, you're ready to get your content out there and draw traffic to it. Let's talk about getting some incoming links and traffic. It used to be you could just go out and buy your incoming links. Didn't matter who you bought them off of or what page of their site your link was on. Today, it's much more complicated than that and requires some work on the client's part.

I grit my teeth when clients say they want rankings and then resist doing the work. You could compare SEO and rankings to dieting: there is no one magic pill, you simply must do some work. The idea of slapping up a web site and sitting back while the money flows in is an urban legend.

You must come up with interesting content and then transform it into articles, blog posts, podcasts and promote it using RSS and directories. Because while we are certainly after good positioning in the search engines, in actual fact the real client that every SEO campaign should have in mind is the end user and not the search engines.

Thomas Martin writes "Writing articles is the fastest and easiest way to get a stampede of people to your website who recognize your name by your signature and adhere to what you recommend."

There are 2 things writing articles does to help your positioning in the search engines:

1. Gives your web site incoming links - each article you submit has an "Author's Resource" area. This is where you put your name, give a brief description about yourself, and get to put a link to your web site. If you write 10 articles and submit them all to a half dozen directories, you've just gotten 60 incoming links. If just 5 web site owners reads your articles and adds them to their web site or blog, you've gained another 50 links. See where this is going? That's why it's called viral marketing.

2. Once you get the human traffic linking to and visiting your web site, the search engines sit up and take notice. Not only do you show the search engines that you're an expert, but also that your web site has fresh content added to it every once in a while.

Don't know what to write? You talk to customers and clients, don't you? They ask questions and you answer them, right? One conversation with a new or existing customer is fodder for an article. People want to know what you know as well as your opinion.

You must also post your articles on your own web site. When someone reads one of your articles and follows the link in your resource box back to your web site, they want to see more.

While writing one article may be a huge undertaking for you, take heart, because you can get a lot of mileage from that one article.

You can use the same content, or portions of it, in a blog post as well as make a podcast out of it. Blogs and podcasts do the same thing for your web site that an article does, you're just delivering it in a variety of ways. If you write one lengthy article, you can divvy it up into several posts and 'casts.

Blog and podcast content is "pushed" out to readers in a different manner than articles. While you must submit each article written to several directories, a list of blog posts and podcasts can be given to directories and they'll be more than happy to put the list on their site for their web visitors to peruse. They both include links to your site just like articles. They'll even check the list periodically to see what's new and add that content too. The "list" is called an RSS feed and must be programmed properly before it's sent to the directories.