Driving a large amount of traffic to your website is best achieved by gaining top positions on the Google search engine. While Google's algorithm is very complex, the essence of what they are trying to achieve is quite simple - reward popular sites with good content.

Web site popularity is measured by the strength of the links that point to a page. Basically Google regards links to a page as 'votes'. Essentially, the more votes you have, the higher you will appear in the search results. Votes do vary in strength, so it's not just a numbers game. For example, a link to your site from the Google.com home page will provide a boost that may carry be equivalent to 100,000 votes from average web pages.

Building up good quality linking is the key to success on Google. Web sites that have already established good linking may find that a few simple changes to their web site could result in an immediate boost to their Google traffic.

In addition to its analysis of your links, Google will be assessing your web site for its quality and relevance to a requested keyword search. There are 3 easy steps that can be taken to help Google understand what your site is about as well as showing that your information is of value to users.

Step 1 - Optimise your Page Titles, Link Text and File Names

There are many areas of your site that Google will be assessing; however three of the most important in my opinion are Page Titles, Link Text and File Names. It is vital that these components are connected and that they contain your target keywords.

For example, if you were to use a Page Title "Contact Us", it would be beneficial to use the file name contact_us.html and link to the page from other pages using the text "Contact Us". I've found that web sites will be rewarded by Google on a usability level if this direct connection is made. In regards to the link text component, the prominence of the link on the web page is a major factor to Google calculation of value. If the text appears closer to the top of the page you will score more points.

In addition to matching these 3 components together, you may need to insert some keywords to boost your website's relevance for a specific search. If your company was called "Leather Boots R Us" and you were wanting to rank for the keyword search "leather boots" you could then go ahead and rename your "Contact Us" page to be "Contact Leather Boots R Us". It would then be beneficial to change your file name to contact-leather-boots-r-us.html2 and your link text to "Contact Leather Boots R Us". Keep in mind that the insertion of keywords needs to be balanced as too many occurrences will have a negative impact on your search engine positions.