With active participation in this community, your hubs can be read by many hubbers. That's what we want don't we? We want to share our ideas, knowledge, thoughts, opinions, dreams, messages, etc. and have it read by as many people as can be, in this case, fellow hubbers.

Increasing traffic to your hub pages is not limited to this community only. There are other ways of increasing website traffic to your pages such as adding it to your email signature, displaying your link in forums or putting a link in your blog if you have one.

Another important way of increasing website traffic to your pages is to capitalize on searches made by people who are interested in your subject. A great many are using search engines to find what they are looking for in the internet.

We don't want to limit our readers to hubbers, bloggers or friends. Do you agree? Searchers from the Internet may not be members of online communities and and as such they are another set of potential readers for your pages. Your website traffic can increase if you design your page to be 'lovable' by search engines.

Search Engines Love Content

Have you heard the experts say "content is king"? That's what search engines love, a page full of relevant content relating to the keyword being searched. They want to satisfy their searchers by providing them with web pages containing content related to the keyword searched.

What searchers type on the search box determines what web pages (among the millions they have stored in their databases) the search engines will display on the SERP(search engine results page). It is obviously important to design pages that contain keywords that potential readers may type on the search box....more on this later.

Search Engines Love Link Popularity

How many websites or web pages that links to your web page determines your link popularity. As far as the search engines are concerned, a website linking to another website counts as a vote to that site.

Webmasters who like your website may put a link on their site pointing to your site. Google or other search engines treats it as a vote to your site. If you have good content on your site, it's possible that other websites will link to your site. Consequently your web page will become popular in the eyes of the search engines

How Important Are Keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases that people type in the search boxes of search engines. To increase the traffic of your website and to compete with the millions of web pages in the search engine databases, you must research and target some keywords that searchers may type in the search box.

Single word keywords may be difficult to target as the search engine will return millions of pages. Keywords which contain 2 or more words are called long tail keywords.

What the search engine does when a person types a keyword in the search box is to find pages containing the keyword and displays what it found(depending on their criteria to rank pages, chief among those are relevancy and link popularity) to the user.

Keywords are very critical in increasing website traffic. In the next section I'll present to you a simple guide on keyword research.

Researching on what keywords to target may take some time but the rewards will come when you see your site getting listed on the first page of google or other search engines.

What You Need

The first thing you need is a search engine like Google. We need it to see how many web pages competes for a particular keyword.

As you can see from the image above, a section from the Google result page just under the search box, shows that it fetched 27,300 pages for the keyword "free crochet snowflakes"

Come on open up google in a new tab if you are using firefox or in a new window if you are using internet explorer.

Next you'll need a tool to estimate how many people searched for a particular keyword per day. There are many available tools for that. We'll use this keyword suggestion tool for our discussion because it's free. Go ahead right click the link and open it in a new browser window or tab.

As an example, let's say you are passionate or know a great deal about crochet and plans to build a web page about it. To give your web page a fighting chance to compete with other web pages, you need to research on what keywords searchers type.

If you don't have the time yet to proceed with this walkthrough, bookmark this page so you can come back later.

Now go to the keyword suggestion tool and type the word "crochet", without the parenthesis, in the text box and click the "submit button". Wait a few secons while the tool fetches the data then scroll down to see the results.

The left column shows you the similar and related keywords typed by searchers. Notice that it includes phrases which are called long tail keywords as I have mentioned earlier.

The next four columns shows you the daily estimates of WordTracker, Google, Yahoo and MSN. While the fifth column shows you the total of the four companies.

Next go to google and search those keywords. For starters search the first item "free crochet patterns". As of this writing, google returned 289,000 web pages competing for that keyword.

Let's try the next keyword "crochet". Google returned 15,200,000 pages for that keyword. Can you imagine the competition with single word keyword? Google returned millions of web pages for the broad keyword "crochet" while the long tail keyword "free crochet patterns" only returned 289,000 web pages.

A safe guide in determining what keywords to target is to select the estimated no. of pages searched daily in the vicinity of 100 searches for WordTracker and the Google competition at around 100,000 pages. Those figures will increase your website traffic earlier than targetting for keywords with a huge competition.

Ok so now open your notepad or spreadsheet whichever is comfortable to you and record each keyword that meets the criteria in the previous paragraph. Oh yes, even if you already have a website, you can use this outline to gain or increase website traffic. Label the first column with keyword, the next with WordTracker and the third with Google.

Some keywords that I found that meets the criteria are: " free crochet doily patterns", "free crochet snowflakes" and "beginner crochet". If you know about crochet, this is niche market you can target.

How To Use The Keywords To Increase Your Website Traffic

First select your primary keyword and include it in the title of your website or article. To add more power, include that keyword in your url. Notice how HubPages assign urls to your hub? It is based on the title! Good SEO.

For example if your primary keyword is "free crochet snowflakes", you can name your domain as "free-crochet-snowflakes.com" with the prefix if you already have a domain say for example crochet.com and adds a web page entirled "free crochet snowflakes", you can name your web page as "crochet.com/free-crochet-snowflakes.htm". Of course include the necessay "http" prefix.

Repeat those keywords several times in your website. A safe rule for repetition is 4 to 7 percent of the no. of words in your content. Make it look important to the search engines by making some keywords bold.

You also need to insert the other keywords you found that meets the criteria. That way, you'll be targetting more keywords and not just one.

Now that you have selected your keywords. you can start creating your content. After that, it's time to start the next important thing in increasing your website traffic: link building. Without links pointing to your site, search engines will never find you. If you have adequate links, the more chance you will have in appearing in the first page of google's results page because you have optimized your content with keywords having less competition.

The no. of links pointing to your site determines your popularity with search engines. There are many in which you can put links to other websites that point to your website. Submitting your site to link directories, participating in social communities, commenting on blogs.

The Anchor Text

It is the text you find usually colored blue indicating that it is a clickable link. Take for example: antioxidants

The word in blue is called the anchor text and it points to the url in my blog. The url is the web address you find in the address bar of your browser when you click the link. The above link can be written in html like this:

<a href=http://neutral-izer.blogspot.com">antioxidants</a>

Use this technique whenever applicable when you are building links so that your url will be associated with the keyword.

Commenting On Blogs To Gain Link Popularity

This is one way to build links pointing to your website. Doing it regularly will increase the amount of links from other websites to point to your site.

You can find many blogs relating to your keyword. Google blogsearch, technorati, and blog directories are places where you can find relating to your keyword. You can also type your keyword in the Google search box and append the word 'blog' without the quotation mark.

A blogger comment form may look like this:

Choose the Name/URL button so you can insert your keyword. Instead of using your name, type your chosen keyword instead then type your website address at the URL text box.

Other blog platforms have different comment forms.

Skip blogs

• If the Name/URL button is not available
• If you need to register to be able to comment - the registration process is a waste of time
• If there is no Name and URL textbox - some blogs only asks for your email address.

Comment on something useful and not just 'nice blog', 'great post'.

Do this often and in no time your website will become popular in the eyes of the search engines. If you comment on more than 3 blogs per day, you'll get 100 backlinks or inbound links to your website in a month.

There's also one important thing when making comments. Never put your url in the comment box as it may be interpreted as spam.

What's Next?

Put your link wherever you can. Forums are a good place where you can place your links. Just remember to use your chosen keyword as an anchor text.

Want to Increase Traffic To Your Website?

Follow the steps outlined above and in no time, you'll start receiving traffic coming from search engines. Have patience though as popularity does not happen overnight. Take some time on the keyword research phase because it is the start of a successful campaign to increase your website traffic. A good start can lead to a good end.

I have just given you a simple outline on what makes a successful website. Follow it or read some books that gives more detail and resources.

I hope you had fun doing the hands on, now it's time to research on keywords for your website. Strive to make it to the search engines, there's a lot of potential website traffic there. Do it so you can spread your message to a wider audience. Good luck!