Most of traffic comes from search Engines ( mostly from Google, then Yahoo and then MSN ) so be in first page for a keyword or a keyphrase is a must if we want our site to be visited. Now it’s proper to talk about the keyword difficulty concept and its applications, keyword difficulty evaluates how is hard to be in the top ten for a keyword, more keywords or a keyphrase and can vary from 0 to 100. For example the keyword “shareware” has a keyword difficulty that is 63 and it’s impossible for a site born yesterday to rank high for a such keyword though a good placing for a such keyword would bring an enormous traffic, then another possibility is to strive to get in the top ten for a less competitive keyword or a keyphrase that brings less traffic but is easier to get a good result. We should attempt to reach for keyphrases that have a keyword difficulty less than 15 ( we can get a keyword difficulty evaluation through free tools like the one offered from seologs.com ).
But why is difficult to be in the top ten for a keyword or a keyphrase ? Simply because we have many or less competitors, their sites have contents created through years and quality links from valuable sources that we don’t have, so if we want to compete with them we must add content to our site and get quality links from other sites. Getting links from others is not easy and neither through link exchange since if our site is about a business then our competitors will not be available to link us and neither we will be available to link them. Links should come from sites pertaining the things our site talks about, getting a link from a site focused on another topics is nearly useless: for example if we sell pet accessories and we get a link from a download music site then this will not be appreciated by search engines.
So if we want to get in the top ten for a competitive keyword then we must get through a process of adding related content and pertaining links to our site, to get pertaining links we can use a technique called article marketing that is about writing good quality articles and sending them to the article directories that can be found searching Google by “article directory”, it is wise to submit the same article to many article directories so more links we will get but also changing the title of our article for every article directory we submit is a good trick to get far more traffic since the number of keywords and keyphrases will increase in this way.