While there are many services proclaiming “free” traffic to your website, at best, these services offer low-quality traffic, and at their worst are trying to get your hard earned money for nothing. The best way to garner more traffic to your site is to use search engine optimization, or SEO, to get your site in front of as many people as possible who want to visit it.

While it may be very simple, keeping your site up-to-date may be one of the most forgotten aspects of SEO. Search engine robots will down rank a site that has old content, especially if it is full of broken links and images. This means that the content is no longer fresh, and less likely to be relevant to potential visitors. You need to keep adding content to your site at least once a week or two to keep your site up-to-date in the search engine’s eyes. Try out your links occasionally to make sure they are all working, and update or remove any of them that are no longer functioning.

If you are promoting a local product or service, make sure to include the geographical location in your content. It is increasingly common to use a search engine as a sort of yellow pages to search for local businesses and reviews. If you do not state where a particular business is, then search engines, as well as potential customers, won’t know. Even if a business does business primarily online, it may be a good idea to give the physical location of the business’ headquarters. This will help make potential customers be more comfortable buying from your site.

Use your keywords responsibly. You want to use around three to seven percent saturation for your main keyword, as well as using some important synonyms within a given page. Any less and the search engine will have a difficult time finding the focus of your page; any more and the robot may penalize your site for keyword stuffing. If you are looking for the best keywords to focus on, you can use sites like Google Trends to see what keywords are searched for the most often.

If you are unsure of what to write about, then start with health, money, or relationships. Despite the saturation of these keywords, they are always in demand. Any SEO optimized website should get decent results in these categories. There is an unlimited amount of content to write about just in these three topics, and they are literally important to everyone. Niche categories offer greater earnings potential as they offer greatly reduced competition, but they are also more difficult to work in so starting with a simple topic such as health can be a fantastic way to learn.

Even if you have failed at SEO in the past, don’t give up. These tips should get you started on improving your rankings. SEO is an art form that is constantly changing, so keep learning and keep trying and you will eventually become successful.