Understanding the Process . . .

If you are given two different recipes that require the same ingredients, the meal you'll cook will be different in both cases. Knowing the right ingredients is one thing, having them is another and knowing how to apply them for a desired result is yet another.

The same goes for traffic . . .

It is not a mystery that you need to get organic search, build link popularity, optimize your pages, publish an ezine, etc. The challenge is the "how" and "when" to do "what" for maximum results.

To help you understand the process, you'll have to pretend you're a visitor to a site (This is easy since you're really a visitor to certain sites).

Ask yourself the following questions . . .

1) How did I find it (the site in question)?

2) When I found it, why did I stay there?

3) If I stayed there, why will I come back again?

4) If I stay there and/or come back again, why will I buy from/through it?

5) Why on earth will I bother telling others about it?

These are just a few important questions. Now, to how they'll help you understand the process . . .

How did I find it (the site in question)?

To find it, you did NOT search for it. You searched for something and it just happened to be one of the sites that showed up on the results page. Its description promised to deliver what you were looking for. The most popular places people do their search online are search engines. You must be using one or all of these sites (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves) or you simply don't operate online.

When you want to search, you use words that are related to what you're looking for (those are called keywords or key phrases in internet jargon). Once you press your "enter" key, you get a number of results.

You begin to read through each description to see which is closest to what you're looking for. When you find one, you happily click to the site.

Hurray, you've found it!

So how can you be the site that was found? You have to write high value content that will really answer those searchers' questions (And you have to make sure certain tags are written tastefully for both the search engines and searchers). You have to write the content in a particular way that the search engines require (On page criteria). You have to get votes of confidence from other sites that yours is a great site (off page criteria).

This is only a highly simplified summary. There is a lot more to it.