There is only one reason to build a website or create a blog; to get people to read your message. It doesn’t matter whether you created your website or blog for fun, to share your views about a subject important to you, or to make money, the more visitors to your site, the better.

If your website traffic is composed of “targeted visitors”…folks with a high level of interest in the subject of your blog or website, that’s even better.

Anybody can buy traffic, and most folks who do pay too much for it. But, wouldn’t you rather get the free traffic that comes as a result of high search engine rankings?

Thus, one of the big secrets of promoting websites is not a secret at all. If you do not have (very!) deep pockets, you must have high enough search engine rankings to produce a substantial volume of organic traffic for your website.

The second million dollar “secret” is a little less obvious, but not surprising. The best way to get organic search engine traffic is by conducting a well-conceived, sustained link building campaign. Of course, the content of your site is important. Of course you must carefully choose your keywords, have them appear appropriately on your website, and use them in your link anchor text. But, once those things are done, your ongoing focus should be on obtaining high quality links.

Writing and submitting articles like this one is a great way to obtain quality links (look at the author’s box below). If you wish, you can hire folks to write for you, very inexpensively. And, there are several good pieces of software which can automate the submission of your articles to article distribution websites, individual website owners, RSS feeds, and media outlets of various kinds.

Requesting links on individual websites can also lead to a big boost in your search engine rankings. And, there are software programs that automate the process of identifying websites on subjects related to yours and contacting their webmasters. Alternatively, you can accomplish the same things manually, but it will be far more time consuming.

My organization has offered a free ten lesson course in search engine optimization designed to help website owners for more than five years. Of all the many things we discuss in the ten lessons, we have found out, over and over again, that nothing is more important than linking.

Webmasters who want as much traffic as possible (and who among us doesn’t?) need to commit to a focused, aggressive link building effort. If they do, their efforts are almost certain to be rewarded.