A web presence may come in a multitude of designs and sizes, from the single page sales page or personal page to the corporate website consisting of hundreds of web pages and everything in between. The reason/s for a web presence is, similarly, varied. However, one thing that all websites need is a constant flow of quality traffic.

How does the web master go about getting this elusive quality traffic, also known as targeted traffic, and what exactly is targeted traffic.

Targeted traffic is visitors that have a genuine interest in or are actively seeking the product / service offered by your website. All other traffic is passing traffic and generally considered a bonus and non-quality traffic; although a good site / sales page can and should be capable of converting this passing traffic into repeat visitors and eventually loyal customers.

The best way to obtain free targeted traffic is to rank within the top 10 results of the major search engines ( Google, Yahoo, MSN ) for a particular niche area or keyword phrase. In order to obtain this the web master needs to steep himself / herself into on-page and off-page optimisation techniques.

This is a vast area of study. Essentially, to get a descent search engine ranking I have two golden rules:

1. Never submit your web page through the conventional submit URL link found on search engine pages; rather get quality incoming URL links and let the search engine spiders find your site.

2. Off-page optimisation is by far more important than on-page optimisation in getting your website a top search engine ranking. Hence, do not overtly stress over factors like keyword density, keyword position, bolding keywords, use of H1 tags etc at the expense of quality content. Quality content will, in the long term, compensate for the lack of good on-page optimisation. On-page optimisation does, however, have its place and is better left to another article.

What then is off-page optimisation and what is the essence of this beast ? Off-page optimisation is the process of obtaining quality incoming links to your website. By quality I mean sites that have a PR of 4 or more, government / authority websites and the obvious larger corporate links obviously all pertinent to the subject matter of your website.

There are a few options to get these quality incoming links:

1. Submit your links to online directories. There are many free quality online directories that you can use. Some free directories require you to become a volunteer editor in order to submit sites for free. Do a search on Google for free directories and submit your site. Open Directory is the #1 directory on the web. A must join!

2. On forums that allow you to post with a signature URL, such as Warrior Forum, you should always have a keyword rich link to your website in your signature. Search engines spider these pages daily and any quality link to your website is good.

3. Copy and paste a few paragraphs from your website in order to create articles on ArticleCity, GoArticle and EzineArticle.com. Be sure to link back to your website in your article. Once these articles are indexed youve got instant high quality back links to your site.

4. Create a blog at Blogger.com. Regularly make posts to it using text from your website, and include a back link to your sites. Once you post your entries, go to Pingomatic.com and ping it so that you will hopefully get picked up somewhere, giving you back links to your blog, which will help because your blog links to your website.

5. Another strong suggestion to get quality incoming links is to run press releases about your site once per month. You can do this at sites like www.prweb.com for $40.00 - $80.00.

6. High quality incoming links can be purchased and there are services on the net that facilitate these transactions. I will not go any further into this but suffice to say, that there are service providers out there .

Remember that Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO ) is merely one method to get traffic to your site.