Why did you start your small business? Most entrepreneurs express several reasons for creating a small- or home-based business. Maybe you want to supplement your income and you have an eye on quitting your day job. Or maybe you've already accomplished that and are looking to take your business to new heights.

A lot of entrepreneurs I know had the motivation to become self- employed simply because they hated fighting traffic: Traffic jams on the way to work, traffic jams in the elevator at the office, traffic jams at the coffee machine during break, and traffic jams on the way home. Everywhere they went, it seemed like the rat race was all about traffic jams.

Once you've left that "rat race" you end up with a completely different approach to traffic: You crave it! But we're not talking about vehicular traffic. Instead, we're talking about website traffic.

For many entrepreneurs -- especially ones who primarily do business online -- the insatiable need for traffic drives nearly every decision: "How can I enhance search engine optimization?" becomes the mantra of traffic-hungry entrepreneurs. The unfortunate temptation for some website owners is to exchange their credibility, professionalism, and salesmanship for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Ultimately, you want to bring people to your site; that's a goal of any business. But in order to do that, some entrepreneurs resort to tricks rather than sound marketing techniques to accomplish this goal. One trick is to write web copy and run it through a site like http://textalyser.net and check the keyword percentage. Once they know the keyword percentage, they insert keywords here and there in an effort to reach the hallowed "4% to 5% window" that most people feel is the sweet spot for SEO.

Unfortunately, the result is web copy that is far from credible and obviously written to be read and ranked by a robot rather than a human being. So what can you do to help you generate traffic while still looking good for the search engines? Here are 4 recommendations to help guide your decision-making.

Pay Per Click

One of the best things you can do is create a Pay Per Click (PPC) account on Google or Yahoo. If you're avoiding PPC because you've been burned by it or because you're afraid of the expense, consider this:

You're spending money anyway (in advertising) but PPC generally drives warm leads to your business instead of browsers. If you put a dollar value on your time, how much would you have already spent just to "tweak" the keyword percentage on your site? You have control over all kinds of factors with Google AdWords to help you control your expenses. (In fact, you should cap the amount you spend per month while you're just getting started). And, most importantly, you can tweak your advertisement periodically to see what pulls better.

Keywords

Even though you just read my scathing criticism of keyword usage in a previous paragraph, let me clarify that keywords are important to have on your site. Here's one smart way to use them.

If you haven't done this lately, go and see what your competitors are doing on their site for keywords. Google your keyword and pick the top 5 sites. Check out their site's source code to discover what keywords they are using in their meta tags and headers.

Choose the top keywords and use those in your meta tags and headers. Remember that the robots that read and rank your site read from the top left to the bottom right, so put your keywords on both places. (The "keyword" currently read by robots on the bottom right of most websites is "copyright"!).

Are there other keyword strategies? Yes. And you should make sure that your keywords are used in your text. But remember that although robots rank your site, it's your human visitors who are going to give you money for your product. So make sure you're ultimately writing for them!

Links

Links can be a good solution, but many small business websites use link strategies poorly. We could spend an entire article talking about link strategies (and we will) but right now, you should know this: If you are going to get someone to link to you, make sure that they have a page rank that is higher than you and that their subject matter is related to you in some way. The page rank is important for the search engines to drive you higher but the similarity that you may have with the other site will help you get customers!

Blogs

Blogs are powerful tools and can help you generate links and content. Blogs are just starting to come into their own as a corporate tool and in many cases, corporate blogs are still uncharted territory. Create an offsite blog but resist the temptation to post one or two highly self-promotional posts and a link. Again, your blog might help you get higher results in a search... but it won't help you convince your customers to buy from you!

Instead, decide on the scope of your blog and how regularly you're going to post and try to determine a potential value that a regular blog can have for your customers. A useable blog will create more links for you (as people link to your blog and your site) and it will create more sales!

These are just a few strategies you can use to help increase your site's presence on the Internet without sacrificing the quality and salesmanship you need to get people to buy from you! There are many more strategies out there and we'll look at them in future articles. Stay tuned!