Search engine optimization - there are several methods which will greatly increase your chances of improving your search engine rankings and, thus, increase traffic to your website.

I am going to briefly take you through two of these. It is vital that you research more about every topic listed here and use all of these methods in helping you to build up your website's visibility.

1. Take a look at your website and your tags. What keywords have you used in the title, description and content? Are they general in their nature? If they are then you definitely need to do some research to increase your chances of being found by using something a little more specific.

What I mean by this is if your keyword is cats, the person who arrives at your site could have been looking for topics or products relating to lions or tigers, or cats eyes on the road or cat print t shirts and an endless list of other items. In order to get visitors who are only interested in what you are offering you need to find a term they will search for eg. "How to stop my cat scratching the furniture".

This would be an ideal keyword as this is a common problem and if you were selling products to counteract this your visitor would come to your site because they were interested in the topic and were looking for the solution. Obviously if you have scratching posts for sale your visitor is more likely to make a purchase.

2. Search engine optimization using links. There are various ways to get links to and from your website. One of these methods is by asking other website owners to add a link on their website to yours. They will most likely want the favour reciprocated and will ask you to put a link from your site to theirs.

How can this be done? Type in a search term which is relevant to your site or product. Check out the sites which are near the top of the search list as this will usually mean they are popular sites with lots of traffic. A direct approach can be used by simply e-mailing them and asking them if they will do this for you. Make it easy by sending them the link ready to copy and paste. Be polite and professional and don't be put off if the answer is no. The website owner is more likely to agree if you are not in direct competition but your products are related and your website is of a good quality.

At this point it is appropriate to re-iterate that if you fail to start working on these two areas as well as others suggested in my previous and forthcoming articles you will not achieve the success you are hoping for.