Many people are put off by search engine optimization due lack of knowledge about the process and the effort that it entails to achieve a good ranking. However, if you understand the process and are aware of some of the best tools that make it considerably easier, a good search engine ranking is readily achievable even for the most inexperienced publishers. If you follow proven methods the results are predicatable and you will get huge amounts of free traffic to your site.

Keyword research is the first, critical step to any successful SEO project. If you get it wrong then you could end up trying to rank well for a very competitive keyword and all your efforts will be going to waste. There are some great free tools for doing this like the Google Keywords tool. However, all the free methods have one significant limitation – they don’t evaluate the SEO efforts of the other competing sites and therefore establish how possible it is to compete in the rankings for that keyword.

In my opinion one of the best paid services is MicroNicheFinder. It overcomes the big limitations of the free keyword research methods. Most importantly of all it considers a variety of highly complex variables to realistically compute your chances of ranking for a specific keyword. It’s available from Clickbank. It’s a tool that I would not be without.

The content of your site also plays a role in achieving good rankings. In particular your site should contain lots of unique, keyword rich content. You should also make sure that you publish fresh content regularly. The search engines love sites are are updated frequently. This is one of the reasons why blogging is such a fantastic way of generating huge amounts of free organic traffic.

If you know anything about SEO you’ll know about the importance of building back links. One of the best methods for achieving this is article marketing. However, if you try and do this effectively manually I reckon there’s a 90% chance that you’ll give up due to the time and effort that this entails. I just don’t have the patience to do it so I use a great tool called Unique Article Wizard which largely automates the process both in terms of generating unique versions of your article and submitting articles to directories on your behalf. It’s a great tool, highly effective and I couldn’t survive without it.

Now Unique Article Wizard is great for quantity of back links. The other thing to consider is quality of back links – i.e. the higher the page rank of the site that you are back linking from the higher the weight the back link from will carry in the eyes of the search engines. High PR sites that will accept a do follow (this is very important) back link are very difficult to find within your niche. For this I use a service offered by Easy Backlinker which is a basically a search engine for locating these sites. You normally get your back link by adding a comment to an existing post or article.

And that’s it basically. If you follow these methods you will get free search engine traffic for your site. I know that these methods work as I use them myself and I can therefore say this with absolute certainty. And the great thing about them is that they don’t take up too much of your time.

While I wait for my SEO efforts to kick in I tend to publish articles on EzineArticles. This results in direct traffic giving me the opportunity to test and optimize my sites.