The fact that you’re reading this probably means that you have already created one or more websites to offer your information or product or service to the world. Perhaps you are an internet business owner with a product to market from one or two websites. Or perhaps you are an affiliate marketer or Adsense marketer with a large number of websites. There are many different (and good) reasons for creating websites, and everyone knows that creating quality websites is not an easy task. So let me begin by congratulating you on completing the first important task in getting an internet-based venture rolling – namely, creating the website or sites that market your business to the world.

But anyone who wants to build an internet business quickly realizes that just creating a website, even a really good one, isn’t enough. In order to build a viable internet business, you need to get something else that is crucial to your success. That something is traffic!

Fortunately there is another way to get traffic. Even better, this traffic source is FREE. What is this source of traffic? Yes, it is indeed Search Engines. If you can optimize your website so that the search engines rank your site highly for relevant keyword search terms, then people will find your website in the search engine listings and people will visit your website. So higher search engine rankings leads to higher traffic.

But this begs the question “How do these websites get to the point where they rank highly in the search engines?” There are two answers to this question. One answer is that you need to optimize the pages on your website so that the search engines will recognize them as more valuable content than web pages on other websites. This isn’t as easy as it once was to achieve. It used to be that webmasters could significantly improve their rankings by making some changes to their own webpages, like using good keywords in meta tags, using proper placement of header tags, etc. But these days, anyone who knows anything about search engine optimization will tell you that these on-page factors, while still useful, only account for 10% of your success in getting good search engine rankings. These days, the key to ranking well in the search engines is to get a large number of relevant inbound links (backlinks) to your website.

It’s important to realize that both the NUMBER and RELEVANCE of inbound links are very important! Sure, the search engines like to see lots of links to your website, but these links carry MUCH more weight if they come from websites that have content strongly related to your website content. For example, if you have a website on fishing poles, a link from a website on fishing boats will do you much more good than links from several websites on beauty supplies or doll clothes. The search engines know that the only way that they can continue to serve up relevant content for the wide variety of search terms they receive is to rank site according to how many RELEVANT backlinks they have.

A second answer is that you need as much really good content on your website as possible. The search engines are getting really good at recognizing spammy content and poorly designed websites, so you need to take the time and effort required to make good high quality websites with good content, the more good content the better. What do you think the search engines will like better a website with just a few pages of original content or a website with lots of pages of good original content?

So, your online income depends on getting good free search engine traffic. This free search engine traffic comes from having high search engine rankings for keyword terms that people use when searching for information on this topic. High search engine rankings come from having Lots of good quality backlinks to your websites, and Lots of good quality content on these websites