One of the hardest things to do with a business website is to attract traffic. But it can be easy. Blogging is a great addition to any type of website: e-commerce, corporate, services, products and more. Adding a blog networking for your website and using the right keywords in the content can send traffic soaring to your site in less time than many other paid marketing techniques.

Consider this a back-to-basics post – one that I hope will be educational to newbies and pros alike. Effective SEO requires us to see the big picture, and I'm calling that picture the 4 R's: Robots, Ranking, Relevance, and Results. For each of the 4 R's, I'll provide some tips and tools for how to measure your progress in that area.

Improve search engine rankings by utilizing these techniques as a guideline to develop search friendly websites.

Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practice of buying links. A good number of folks have pointed out that, years ago, I endorsed several text/paid link brokers - companies that aggregate link ad inventory and sell it to those seeking to boost their rankings.

A good primer on directory links and where you should focus your efforts.

For a long time, links have been the largest factor in search rankings. While (in my opinion) this is still true today, other signals are gradually growing in importance. One of the most interesting of these is “web references” or “citations”. A web reference refers to a mention of a brand, product or web site, which is not referenced in a link (or perhaps referenced as a no-followed link).

Before I share why I DO link to others from my blogs when quoting or borrowing ideas directly from others I thought it might be worthwhile sharing some of the reasons people gave yesterday for why they thought links were becoming LESS used in this way.

These days, the tech-savvy small business is using search engine optimization to steer customers to its home page. But once those online visitors land, how do you get them to buy? Sure, you can pay a lot for site analytics that give you insights into those potential customers' shopping habits. But small-business owners now have a variety of simple yet effective tools to tempt visitors into opening their wallets.

Here are the three best ways to convert Web traffic into sales:

It’s a fact that people trust known associates more than complete strangers. It works the same with businesses. Branding your business goes a long way with customers trusting you to deliver top results. Social media marketing is a way to “make friends” with future and current customers. Social media networking services help build trust between you and your customers.

What is the purpose of that new page you're adding to your site?Is it to rank highly for a keyword term? That's half the battle won, of course :) After the visitor has arrived on your page, what do you want the visitor to do next? According to Seth Godin, you probably want a visitor to do one of five things...