I love free (or nearly free) Internet Marketing Methods. I can’t help it. I know that I can plunk some cash into my adwords account and almost instantly stream a flood of traffic to a web site…I know it…but I still LOVE to get that traffic for free, even if it takes a long time for that traffic to come around and even if it takes a huge effort on my part to get it.

That’s probably one of the main reasons why I’ve always loved Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing methods. The idea that I can do a few things to tweak the SEO of my web site, then do a little work getting backlinks that point to my site…and then watch a floodgate of steady free targeted visitors begin to flow into my web site; is intoxicating. And I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here! (Or at least you do if you’ve been around very long in the Internet Marketing world).

And it was especially the case back in the earlier days of the Internet, say around 1996 or so. Back then you could literally load your meta tags up with hundreds of keywords and then shoot up to the top of the rankings at the “search engines” (I use quotes because they were only vaguely what we would think of as search engines today!).

Of course, that sort of thing quickly stopped working as the search engines became more sophisticated, but the idea is still the same today. Do a few things to your site in order to make it more attractive to the search engines and enjoy tons of free traffic in exchange.

But is all that traffic actually free? That question got me thinking….

Today, onpage SEO factors are only a VERY minor part of getting a web site ranked well at the search engine. Backlinks are massively more important, and backlinks take a HUGE amount of time to do it right. Sure you can spam your site onto all the social media type sites like digg and reddit and mixx and twitter etc and you will get some short term bumps, but they never lead to long term sustainable search engine rankings.

No, today you have to put a lot of time into building link bait in order to get others to link to you (and let’s not forget the fact that you have to get people to your site TO BEGIN WITH before they link to you...which takes time and money).

Other than that you can use article marketing to get back links, and I do that a lot… but it takes a lot of time and effort to pump out fifty to a hundred articles to the major article directories because I don’t spin them or duplicate them on different directory sites.

So when you think about it…all that “free” SEO traffic isn’t really all that free after all. If you value your time at more than minimum wage, free SEO can actually become prohibitively expensive!

But still…it’s still just so much fun!

Internet marketing is a great profession. There’s nothing better than building a web site, marketing it a little bit, sitting back, and watching the orders come flooding in.

And in the arsenal of Internet marketing tools, there are none so satisfying as Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing methods! Why is that? Because SEO is free, for the most part. Not only is it free, but it is continuous and targeted. By that I mean, you can put forth a finite amount of effort and continue to reap results for years to come. And of course, I mean targeted because your prospects pre-qualify themselves by going to the search engines and actively searching for whatever they are looking for.

Thus you know that if someone found your web site from the search engines, then they are actively looking for exactly what you are offering.

The problem with search engine marketing is that its unpredictable and difficult. There is no real right way to do it. Sure, there are a lot of industry best practices to follow, but these change so often that it’s often hard to keep track of them all!

So I’ve decided to cut through the muck today and explain the most important part of SEO. What is that? It’s pretty simple actually. The most important part of SEO is linking.

The major search engines have a long list of things that they use to determine how to rank a web site. But the most important thing is links, by and large. Think of links as “votes”. If another site links to you, then they are in essence “voting” for your site.

Then, the site with the most votes gets ranked the highest (usually, but not always…see, its tricky!).

So what you want to do is convince as many sites as possible to link to you. There is many ways to do this. You can offer them something…like an eBook or free video in exchange for a link. You could pay them to link to you, but the major search engines don’t like that and it can get you into trouble.

Finally, you can go out and create the links yourself, which is what you will probably end up doing. There are a number of ways to do this, like article writing. You can write articles, like this one, and post them to article directories. Most article directories allow you to post a signature file at the end with 2-3 links in it. That is where you put your links to your site.

There are many other different methods of creating links, but article marketing is one of the safest. You see, if you build links too quickly, the search engines can get angry. The best way to do it is slowly but surely, and that’s why article marketing is perfect, because you can only write so many articles at once!