There is no point in creating a website unless you have thought about how you are going to get visitors. Whether your website is commercial or not then sooner or later you are going to want to attract visitors. You need a significant proportion of your traffic to come from the search engines. The search engines generate targeted traffic and the great news is its costs you nothing.

Search engines stay in business by understanding what the user are searching for and delivering relevant results. The more relevant and precise the search results the better the user experience and therefore the greater the chance the user will user will return. The more frequently users return to the search engine the more opportunity and income the search engines create. The challenges are the exactly the same for you and your website.Acquire users and keep them coming back.

So how do you do this?. There are two paths to achieving this and the good news is you can if you have the money do both. You can pay for advertising, commonly known as Pay per Click or you can create great content and get people to link to it.

As far as all of the search engines are concerned nothing exists on the internet without a keyword or a key phrase. The whole user experience starts with a keyword or key phrase being entered into the search engine to tell it what the user is looking for. The search engine refers to a gigantic index to retrieve a list of the web pages it deems to be the most relevant to the keywords the user entered. All search engines determine what will be returned in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) by using two measures [2] authority and relevance.

Relevance is determined by the occurrence of [3] keywords in the web page content and authority is largely derived from [4] back links from other web pages. Search engines calculate the position of a web page in a returned list of results by measuring the authority and number of backlinks to each page.

Back links are the sledge hammers of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Back links have two major functions – routing traffic to your web pages and helping the search engines determine the ranking of your web pages in the results returned by a user search. Back links that are appropriately named in web pages are more likely to be clicked on by users. This text in the back link is known as ‘anchor text’ and this too is taken into consideration by the search engines. Each back link has a value associated with it which can vary depending upon its origin.

Back links from web pages that contain content related to your web page have an impact on the authority of your web page.Significantly authoritative web pages can pass some of their authority through the back links to your page.