If there is one thing that will make the search engines love your site, it’s content.  Every time you add a new, informative, useful page to your site, the search engines will love you a little bit more.  However, even if the search engines fall madly in love with you due to the excellent content on your site, they won’t send you any traffic if you don’t help them out.

It is the goal of the search engines to provide a set of links that reflect the keywords entered in the search box at their site as accurately as possible.  They don’t want to list pages that happen to mention the keywords – they want to find pages that are actually about the subject.  If people use a search engine and find what they want, they’ll be back again.  Many people forget the a search engine is a business and their market is people looking for stuff.  To be successful, they need to provide a quality service.

Now, if you provide quality content on your site, the search engines want you to rank highly.  The key to making sure that you do rank well is to make sure that you focus your content on keywords that people would use when they search.

For example, if you sell dog food, chances are that people would search for “dog food” when looking for your site or one like it.  This means that if you describe your product as canine nourishment all over your site, chances are you won’t rank well for the keywords that people actually use.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to come up with product names that are very generic but it does mean that if your product is not well known, you will need to use generic terms on your pages to get search engine traffic.

This doesn’t only relate to people who sell products.  It is the same situation for sites that are looking to get traffic for other purposes.

The key is to focus on keywords and phrases that people will actually use on the search engines.  Here is a real life example.  I wrote an article for my site called The Basic Uses of SSI.  There is nothing particularly wrong with that title but unfortunately, virtually no-one will search for that phrase.  If I had called it SSI Tutorial – The Basic Uses, I would have got a lot more traffic.  Why?  Because people interested in finding out how to use SSI on their sites are likely to search for “ssi tutorial”.

A very well known marketing method is to use page titles and article titles designed to grab attention. Generally, that kind of approach works well but only if you can get the title in front of your target market.  If I wrote an article about search engines and called it “Get a Fantabulous Traffic Flood”, people may read it if they saw it listed somewhere.  Unfortunately, in regards to the search engines, they will never see that title because they won’t search for those keywords.

So, help the search engines out.  They want to send you traffic – you just have to let them do it.  Make sure that pages on your site, where possible, are focused on keywords that people would actually use to find you.  It’ll most certainly pay off in the long run.

Google AdSense is an excellent way to earn some very substantial revenue from your high-content websites.  What do I mean by high-content?  Pages with tons of useful, relevant, targeted TEXT.  Not pages stuffed with affiliate links, graphics, banners, or Flash animations.  Search engines don't care about that crap, they mainly look for excellent content in order to rank your sites.

The Google AdSense program seems to be looking for VERY specific things when they decide whether to accept or reject your AdSense application.  Some of these things are mentioned in the AdSense FAQ, and some of them are not.

• What should you do if you get rejected?
  
• Should you apply if you think there is a chance that you will be rejected?  (The answer to this one is NO!) 
  
• What is the suggested content level of a "good" AdSense site? 
  
• What is the best way to build a site specifically for the Google AdSense program?

The answers to all of these questions (and many more) are available at no charge to you.  This site has done a very sophisticated and thorough analysis of the Google AdSense program, and is happy to share the results with you.  Go get your questions answered, and start making some money!