4.Banner Exchange: A good number of websites use banner exchanges as a way to get visible exposure on other sites. By exchanging banners with other websites, people see your unique banner without much competition from other businesses. In exchange, all you have to do is post other webmaster’s banner on your own site. Many services even allow you to rotate banners on multiple sites. Check out following sites for a good starting point: http://free-banners.com/ and http://www.bannerswap.com .

5.Directory Listing: When Internet first gained popularity, Yahoo became famous for having a well-organized directory. Although they now charge money for inclusion into their directory, it is still possible to find plenty of other highly visited directories. By having a listing on these sites, you can generate a steady amount of highly targeted traffic. The following are two of more popular directories that offer free listings: http://www.webworldindex.com and http://www.dmoz.org .

By following these steps, you should see a dramatic increase in your web traffic. The key is to always think about website promotion--if you spend a little time each day following one of these steps, you will be rewarded with more visitors and hopefully more customers. Good luck, and happy advertising!

P.S. Stay tuned for more free ways to increase traffic to your website!

Now, you may be thinking that this SEO thing is too easy: you could just manipulate a few page elements and you would be all set. The search engines, however, are smarter than that. To avoid this kind of potential abuse, search engines rely heavily on links from other pages. In a nutshell, more links to your page from quality pages with content related to your site you can get, higher your page will rank. In other words, you can have a great page, but if nobody is linking to it, you will not achieve high search engine rankings.

That's it.

In summary: chose right keywords, utilize them often on your page, and get as many links as you can from quality pages related to your site's content, and you will be on your way to high search engine rankings. The rest is just time and patience.

While goal of this article is just to give you a quick overview of what Search Engine Optimization is, you can further explore this topic by reading this Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Tutorial. If you found this article useful, you may also want to expand your Search Engine Optimization knowledge by reading Aaron Wall's SEOBook (http://www.accordmarketing.com/seobook/ ).

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Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on Internet marketing and web design topics.  He publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips and resources.  You can freely reprint his articles on your website, ezine, or ebook.