Building traffic to a blog is essential and one of the great ways of doing that is through article writing. This process, along with guest posting, works on 2 ways.

But to begin with, you need to do your research. Before starting to write a random collection of articles that you can submit to you favourite collection of article directories and blogs, you need to prepare the groundwork.

Targeted Writing, Not Mass Waffle!
Just writing, writing and writing is not the best way forward. It might, long term, increase your Page Rank, but this is just an indicator of the trust your website has gained from Google and does not affect the traffic that you will receive.

Instead, you need to research keyword phrases and write about them. Use tools such as the Google Keyword selector tool and type in a couple of keywords that relate to your website. From this you can see the volumes of traffic that are associated with your preferred keywords and then pick some that are probably not that competitive and you might be able to perform well with.

Find The Longer Keywords
You should be able to dig around these keywords to find longer phrases that include these keywords, which have probably got less traffic and less competition. It is these longer keywords that you should start on, as by default as you work on the longer ones, your ranking for the shorter ones also starts to improve.

Not Just Search Engine Optimisation
But, this is only the first aspect of article writing for traffic. As you write and submit articles you are spreading your incoming links far and wide and it is these that the search engines reward you for with more traffic.

There is a second, huge, advantage of article writing. If you are submitting also to the high quality, high traffic article directories rather than just the low quality directories that exist only for page rank, there is a huge benefit that you might initially overlook.

Real People Read Your Writing
And this benefit is in actual traffic arriving from these article directories and blogs you are guest posting on. One article alone that I wrote a few months ago still sends me 1 or 2 visitors every day, just from one article directory.

For this to work you have to submit to quality site, produce useful and well written pieces that provide some valuable information that the visitors to the sites want to read, can find and then tempt the readers over to your site to discover more about what you have to say.

It Is Not Easy, But It Works!
No one has ever said it is easy, but it is possible to use article writing to increase your website optimisation and also directly increase the traffic to your website, if you take your time to research the subject and then write a good article.

It can be wonderfully rewarding to start seeing a trail of visitors arriving at your website because of your hard work. So try it now!

If you are buying links, then what is the best value? Are you paying a lot of bloggers to talk about you on low page rank websites, or fewer to give your website some buzz on higher ranking web-sites?

The problem is that it is not always clear from a page rank, or a count of incoming links, merely how popular a website is. Even a low ranking site may have thousands of unique daily traffic, whereas merely because a weblog has a huge page rank does not guarantee any visitors per day.

So, if you might, looking at the visitors stats is a extraordinary starting point to going for where to place your adverts. But, this only works if the blogs that you are advertising on are highly relevant to your theme and can send you some of their visitors.

But a lot of advertisers are more interested in the search engine benefits of buying links. Rightly or wrongly, this is the case. So, what are the best links?

Well once more, links from a relevant page on a site are always much better than links from a completely different theme of page. The major search engines are thought to differentiate between links that are on relevant pages and links that are from a random page. But even links from off topic pages might work, merely not as well.

Then, of course, a link from a page of, for instance, a page rank 4 page are more beneficial than from a lower page rank page. But how much so? Well, as a rule the consensus is that a link on a page is worth about 3 – 5 times the value (in search ranking terms) of a link on a page of 1 rank below it. So, if you buy 4 links on a PR3 page, you have roughly the same search engine benefits as 1 link on a PR4 page.

But, what does that mean if you are paying bloggers to post round you? Well, roughly speaking, you would expect a well ranking blog to result in your advert being placed on a post with some sort of page rank, whilst one without a rank is virtually without doubt not going to have a ranking on the post pages.

We’ll also look at typical costs. For a 100 word advert on a PR0 website, you might be look at paying the blogger about $1.50. For a PR1 blog the fee may be $2.50 and for PR2 $5. OK, the home page’s Page Rank does not always correlate to the post page’s rank, but you might see that at these levels, for paying round twice the price, you are actually getting 3 – 5 times the value.

So surprisingly, paying more for less links could be better. Of course, buy loads of links and you might be lucky and get in early on a site that will in future become a very well ranked site. An exceptional low host high value link, but not guaranteed.

So, for the best value links, look for sites that can place themed posts that have a good page rank. They might cost more, but the value you get back should be even better.