Copyright (c) 2010 Riley West

Targeted traffic is the very best kind of traffic to have and it is sort of the "holy grail" for SEO marketers

If you have been trying to earn money online with a web site of any type you already know that the offer is just half of the equation and it may well be the small half.

Traffic is the other half of that equation and without it any site, no matter how good, is dead.

But you can generate traffic to your web site, and thereby to your offer, with methods usually referred to as SEO, or search engine optimization.

We are not talking about plain old traffic. We want to get targeted traffic.

That's the traffic you want! If you are selling deck shoes you need the traffic coming to your site to be made up of people who want to buy deck shoes. It's a little easier said than done.

In this article we'll look at several things you can do to start bringing in traffic that won't put you in the position of paying for traffic or being driven broke for the lack of traffic.

1. Keywords: This is the best way to "optimize" your website so that Google, and other search engines, will see your site as good for serving up in the search results.

In other words you want to have "deck shoes" in titles, text and pictures on your deck shoe site. The better you do at this, the faster your trip to page one.

In this case here, you DON"T want to rank for "shoes." The competition would be too tough and the traffic would be too diverse.

Since your site is targeting deck shoes the main keyword would be deck shoes, but you'd also want to get rankings for leather deck shoes, buy deck shoes and purchase deck shoes or other "long-tail versions.

There may well be hundreds of variations of your keyword and some of them will be just right for you to go after. That's one of the best ways to targeted traffic. Try the Google Keyword Tool.

Here are some good tips on your use of keywords.

Observe the one percent rule. Be sure to have your keyword in your title, and near the beginning of your first paragraph and your last paragraph. Have the keyword in the body of your copy in a ratio of about 1 to 100, or one percent.

When it comes to titles, make them "catchy" as often as you can.

Keywords are good, and titles and copy are important, too, but it is hard to beat "backlinks."

Google really likes them.

2. Backlinks: A backlink is just another site that is linking to yours. The higher the Page Rank of the site linking to yours, the better.

In context text links are the best, in my opinion, because Google counts the keyword text where your link originates as important. Google sees it as a 'vote" for your site for that exact keyword!

If you want your rankings for "deck shoes" to go up, thereby increasing targeted traffic, here's an example of a great link. "If you are an avid boater you know the value of good deck shoes." - where deck shoes is the actual clickable link back to your site!

Article submissions are great for this. But there are two more simple methods for getting backlinks.

These would be...

3. Social Bookmarking... just look up 'how to do social bookmarking" on Google.

4. Submitting to web directories. Same as above. Google will show you the places to get this done.

Doing these four things will be great way for you to start getting your share of the highly targeted traffic that Google supplies in boatloads every day.

Go after it and get your slice!