Traffic is the lifeblood of a website; without it, nothing much happens. So if you want to increase your site traffic and ranking, there are a few basic principles that you should follow. Here are some tips to help you achieve your aim.

1. Make sure that your site is content rich i.e. that it contains interesting and informative articles, reviews of useful products or offers valuable services.

2. Use a keyword research tool to make sure you know which keywords your potential customers are searching for and how many competing pages there are for that keyword. There are plenty such tools available but my favourite is Keyword Elite.

3. Select a primary keyword (or phrase) and about five secondary keywords. Use your primary keyword in your site title and the title of at least your home page. Spread the secondary keywords throughout your page content.

4. Make sure that you use your keywords in your site metadata i.e. title, description, tags.

5. Make your website user friendly; the design should be simple with clear navigation between pages and obvious links to your products.

6. Submit your sitemap to the major search engines. If you do that they will come back and crawl your site for themselves and discover what's new.

7. Search engines change their methods of ranking websites from time to time. Make sure that you know what's current and alter your content accordingly. Use tracking tools to keep up to date with how well your website is ranked.

8. Check out the top ranked sites for your keywords and see what they're advertising and how their sites look.

9. Use your hosting logs or a tracking tool to find out where your traffic is coming from. Analyse what keywords were used to find your site and which sites are linking to yours.

10. Encourage your visitors to sign up for your newsletter so that you can keep in touch with them to let them know about new products, free offers and anything else of interest.

11. Become known as an expert in your field by submitting your own articles which link to your site to article directories.

12. If you're selling products make sure that payment and shipping is easy for your customer to deal with.

13. Update your website regularly. This will interest your visitors as well as the search engine spiders.

14. Make sure that you have an RSS feed so that your visitors can subscribe and be updated when you publish new articles or reviews.

If you follow the above tips to increase site traffic, you'll soon have plenty of customers who want to return over and over again.