Alright, you have just put the last minutes touches on the look of your new website, it's been uploaded on to your favorite web host (vexxhost, obviously!). Now, you want some people to look at your web pages but don't want to spend much. Introducing the world's most efficient free, guaranteed, traffic: Search engines (such as Google, Bing - previously named Live - previously named MSN, Yahoo!).
If you get your website listed on any of those search engines, that's an accomplishment, however, that's just half the task because you won't get any traffic on the 685th page. In order to get plenty real visitors that are looking specifically for your web page, you have got to get in the first pages on the search engine.
First of all, you have to do a research on what keywords you need to focus on optimizing your site on; this is very important, make sure the keyword you're working with is not something that's very vague. For example, if you try to be the #1 on Google on “blog”, well, good luck. The end result will be that you won't get to #1 on keyword “blog” and you'll have no traffic, if you focus on the keyword “car blog” instead, you have a much bigger chance into making it to the first page, while at the same time having very good traffic on your website.
Page 685 of “blog” with almost no traffic or Page 1-2 of “car blog” with decent traffic, your call.
Once you've picked your specific keywords that you want to focus on, what to do with them is very simple. The best way to gain placement and traffic on search engines is that to optimize each page of your website on a specific keyword.
Take for example that you are a web hosting company (coincidentally called vexxhost, too), then you would try to optimize one of your pages for the keyword cloud computing service and another page for quality web hosting and so on. You'd also make sure that all the pages that have your plans/services are also optimized for the product itself, for example, Shared Web Hosting, Reseller Web Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, etc.
This will make it much easier to get a higher placement on search engines on those specific keywords, instead of those vague keywords that are very difficult to make it on the first page of, like web hosting.
You can also look into how external linking can affect your website through our earlier blog post.