The best kind of traffic is the free kind -- that is, the traffic that comes from natural search engine rankings. Acquiring those rankings, however, takes time and a dedicated effort; but once you achieve that positioning, it's only a matter of doing a little maintenance work. And, most importantly, you don't have to reinvest half your profits back into advertising to maintain the higher sales volumes you achieve.

How to Get Ahead So how do you improve your rankings without spending a fortune? According to Andy Jenkins of http://ConvertLinks.com, the key to increasing your rankings isn't decoding a complex mathematical algorithm, but having good content and employing that content to better your positioning:

* Create your site in HTML. It's not enough to just have good content: you have to put that content in a form that's search engine friendly.

* Use RSS feeds to syndicate your content. Search engines love fresh, changing content.

* Publish your articles using a blog, and syndicate and submit them to article directories. Says Jenkins, "As you give out quality content to other sites, you not only increase your own link popularity, but you also enhance your site in the search engines."

* Don't attempt to optimize your site around a keyword by simply cramming that word into your copy as many times as possible. The search engines will ignore this misguided SEO attempt, and your sales message won't read well to anyone who actually does stumble onto your site.

Search engines have advanced to the point they recognize and associate words that are used together often. Rather than repeating a word over and over, try using related words. If you sell pasta, for example, use words like "angel hair," "penne," "shells," "linguine," "Italian," and "marinara." The engines will recognize the relationships between the words and register your site as pasta-related.

Proper SEO Takes Time You can take short cuts that will let you get ahead in the search results -- until the next time the search engine companies change their ranking algorithms. But staying ahead requires doing things the right way: you have to create useful, interesting content and give visitors a reason to come back to your site. You're building a business -- short cuts won't pay off in the long run.

If you have an established site, you could begin to see more visitors and more sales from real, diligent SEO efforts in a very short time -- sometimes even a week or less. If, however, you're just starting your online business, even with your exhaustive efforts, it may take six weeks to a couple of months before you start to see traffic trickling through. But as Jenkins points out, "The payoff is search engine positions that endure even when Google, Yahoo, and MSN update their algorithms."