Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to drive lots of consistent traffic to a website or an affiliate program site. Traffic to a website through this means is triggered by how high the website is ranked by search engines; for instance, a site that enjoys the first ten or first twenty ranking on a site like Google is guaranteed a high volume of daily visitors for such ranking. Search engine traffic is very important and can boost your website's potential of making more money since a lot of people who do not know of your website can easily reach you using relevant keywords to search for your website's topic. There are no hard-and-fast rule to search engine optimization since various means can be employed; the following paragraphs elucidates some of these means.

• Search engine optimization cannot be effectively implemented without keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that people type into search bars of search engines when searching for a particular topic of interest. For your affiliate program website to gain top ranking on sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN search etc., you need to optimize your website with keywords or keyword phrases; your chosen keywords should be those related to your website's theme or topic. You can optimize your site with keywords through articles you write and post to article directories, by using keywords both in the article content and in the author's resource box. You can also optimize your site with keywords through your participation in forums, by linking your website using keywords in your signature box; another way to optimize your site with keywords is by including it in your site's domain name and also by using relevant keywords as tags for your website.

• Another way to take advantage of search engine optimization is through link building. Link building is the process of having links that point to your website from so many other websites. Search sites like Google take this factor into consideration in ranking a site because they view it as quality link or referral when your site has links that point at it from several websites, hence they figure that a website with good number of referral link contains valuable information. When links to your affiliate program site is present in so many websites, search engines will easily index your site for search result; this is because they are able to crawl through websites and index them via their program called spiders; because this spiders (program) are sensitive to link popularity, they easily index sites with more frequent links from other websites when they crawl the web to collect data; therefore the higher the occurrence of a site's link, the more probable it is that such website will get indexed by search engine spiders. Some of the ways to build quality links are by commenting on relevant blogs, link exchange, placing links on your other websites and social bookmarking.

• Furthermore, in order to guarantee positive result with search engine optimization, you need to ensure that there is a system in place that will enable you to check whether your site is still optimized for search result or not; this will help you get facts such as: knowing when your site is not performing well on search engine ranking and the need to make amends, and keeping abreast of current keyword trend so as to ensure that your affiliate site remains relevant. For you to properly track your site's ranking performance, you need to take advantage of a tool known as web analytics. This is a service that enables you to track important data such as - which search engines are leading to your site, which keywords are leading people to your site and the number of visitors based on keywords.