Search Engine traffic has always been and continues to be one of 
the best ways to drive qualified traffic to a web site --- it 
presents information about goods and services when the interest 
level is high and it can be acted on immediately. Up till now 
opt-in e-mail marketing has been an effective complement to 
search engine ranking campaigns; but the never-ending deluge of 
Spam is rapidly ruining the effectiveness of opt-in e-mail and 
helping to add luster to the value and cost-effectiveness of 
search engine traffic. 

Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of search engine 
ranking methodologies is helping to raise the barriers to entry 
- as more businesses, ad agencies and SEO firms concentrate 
their efforts on creating highly optimized web sites, the 
competition for keyword rankings and qualified traffic is 
increasing significantly. The rules are changing rapidly and 
if you expect to succeed you must deploy a sophisticated 
methodology that blends technology and processes. Here is a 
list of five bottom line requirements that must be adhered 
to if you expect to generate qualified traffic: 

Link Strategy: The web is maturing and search engines are 
putting more and more emphasis on link popularity or page rank 
or "PR" in Google's vernacular; i.e. the number of web sites 
pointing back to your own. If you are to be successful you must 
develop and deploy a systematic process to establish links to 
your web site with others that are in your market segment and 
setup an outbound "link to" resources page via your own site. 
This takes an investment of time and resources --- typically 
you need between 400-800 links back to your web site to achieve 
a good "page ranking." Here is a link to an excellent detailed 
article on setting up an effective link popularity strategy: 
http://www.website101.com/arch/archive143.html

Keyword Fundamentals: Keywords are the fundamental building 
blocks of any search engine ranking campaign --- many/many 
companies waste significant resources optimizing for keywords 
that are either wrong; i.e. not targeted for their market or 
there is too much competition and rankings will never be 
achieved. You must utilize keywords that are targeted for your 
market and find those that can effectively drive page 1-3 
rankings --- WordTracker www.wordtracker.com has rapidly emerged 
as the defacto industry standard technology tool for researching 
keywords --- we've used it for years and highly recommend this 
cost-effective and comprehensive service to our clients and 
business partners. 

Keyword Saturation: Search engine "spiders" or "bots" are 
automated software applications that constantly roam the web to 
assess what is called "keyword saturation" via web site content 
(pages) to identify how a site should be listed in a search 
engine database. They typically look for 3-7% usage of keywords 
versus the text on a specific page - you must adhere to their 
standards if you want to achieve keyword rankings for your 
selected keywords. And, to further complicate matters, top tier 
search engines all have different rules for keyword saturation 
--- we highly recommend and use this software application to 
help us ascertain and setup the correct keyword saturation for 
our client's web sites: http://www.se-optimizer.com/

Optimized Content: Highly optimized content is still very 
important as far as search engines are considered --- the more 
search engine optimized content on a web site the better. Search 
engines prefer content that is thematically grouped, loads fast, 
is textual with minimal graphics, is highly optimized for 
keywords (keyword saturation fundamentals are addressed) and 
incorporates one or two of your primary keywords for a specific 
page in the page title. 

Site Maps Essential: Site maps are frequently overlooked when 
search engine ranking processes are deployed. A site map not 
only serves as a quick reference and/or navigation guide for 
anyone visiting your web site but it's also used by search 
engines to "crawl" (the action a spider or bot takes to review 
your web site) your web site to find pages and links. Make sure 
you include a basic site map in your optimization plans, it's 
very important to help search engines navigate through your 
site.