A question I’ve been asked quite a few times (especially in relation to SiteBuilder Elite) is “What’s the best tool for doing keyword research?”

Well, it’s really six of one and half a dozen of the other.

The best tool is the one that best suits your way of working. But, having said that, here are a few pros and cons for the more popular tools…

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The heart of any website is the content it contains. It’s what draws visitors, keeps them coming back and influences how the search engines (particularly Google) value your site.

A site that’s all bells and whistles with little or no real content will always be outperformed by a more plainly designed site that has content.

In other words, a site that has somthing to offer human visitors is what you need to strive for.

Many newbies to website building make the fundamental mistake of attempting to tailor their sites for the search engines, forgetting about the people who’ll (hopefully) be visiting them. The flaw is in thinking that because you get better rankings in the search engines you’ll get a lot more (human) visitors. Initially, that might be true, but sites that don’t have anything to offer visitors will soon start dropping in the rankings. So you’ll see that initial quick rise in page rankings, a short-lived peak and then a gradual (or sometime sudden) descent through the rankings.

The trick is to design your sites for people, not search emgines. People bring activity and backlinks. Search engines notice that and reward sites accordingly by increasing their rankings.

But this brings up the question of where to get content for your sites, especially if you’re building sites about a topic you personally know little about.  So here are some suggestions on ways of getting content for your sites (most, unfortunately, are not free):

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Every website stands or falls on the traffic it receives, regardless of the tool you use to build the site.

A first step is to submit your site’s sitemap to the search engines (SiteBuilder Elite does this for you) but it is only a first step. You can also submit sitemaps through Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The search engines love active sites (especially Google); that doesn’t just mean the number of new pages added to a site on a regular basis, but the number of inbound links to the site. If a site keeps getting new inbound links (links from other sites pointing to it), then it must be popular, and that’s reflected in the page rankings in the search engines. Higher page ranks mean higher positions in the search engines and more traffic coming to your sites through natural searches.

However, getting traffic isn’t enough. You need the right kind of traffic and you need to give that traffic some useful information. Basically, you should think of yourself and your sites as being in a service industry that provides information to people. The better the information, the more likely people will revisit and the greater the chance that they’ll buy products or click ads listed on your site.

So if submitting a sitemap is just a first step, what other methods are available for getting traffic?

In this post, I’ll look at the free options (the next post will look at paid options):

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