The survival of any business is dependent on paying customers, and in order to get paying customers you need traffic. There are many ways to bring in traffic to your website and some of them are actually quite expensive, but the key to all this traffic is not how much you spend to get someone to visit your website, but whether or not you are selling what they are looking for.

Traffic, without being targeted to people who are actually looking for something you have to offer, is just that: traffic. What you want is to direct people to your website who are actively searching for what you are selling. The best, most cost effective way of doing that is through Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

SEO is a method of identifying the keywords that people are searching for and setting up your page to optimize those keywords and then get picked up by the major search engines. Your goal in SEO is a minimum of getting on the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), and ultimately to get the coveted number one spot. That makes you the first entry that comes up on the search results page when someone types in the keywords you are using for your webpage.

Getting your page to the top ten, and ideally the number one spot, will definitely get people to click through to your page, which is how you bring potential customers face to face with your offer. You still need to have a good enough offer, and a well written sales page to be able to change the potential customer into a paying customer, but the first step is getting them to your site.

There is quite a bit more to SEO than just including your keyword a few times on a webpage, and a few things to consider that will help bring customers to your site over the other sites that are returned in the same SERP from searching for your keywords. Most search engines still draw the heading or title of your listing from the title tag and the description just below it from the description tag that is listed in your Metadata in the heading of your html code. If no description tag exists, the search engine will generate a description from the first few lines of the first paragraph on your webpage. So it is important to put some time and effort into writing both the description tag in your Metadata and the first few sentences on your page. This is what your potential customer is going to read when your page pops up in the search engine results and is what they will use to determine whether or not to visit your site.

Will SEO bring customers to your site? Yes, it most definitely will. But keep in mind that the search engines do not publish the site positioning algorithm they use or the criteria that determines your position in the SERP. It is as much testing and trial, as it is a science, but there are some known methods that you can use to boost your site ranking. The thing about achieving a good SEO position is that once the optimization is done, the traffic will continue to build and it won’t cost you anything to get and keep those customers coming in to your site to see your product and read your offer.