Let's talk about how a commercial website should work.

Ideally, there should be several avenues to get traffic to your site. For instance, when you've got it all up and running, you'll be receiving traffic from multiple sources-search engines, articles you've written, pay per click ads you're running, ads on paid ad sites, forum posts...you name it.

I call this the traffic source network. Let's take a moment and understand what I mean by this.

The center of your traffic source network is your home page, which is optimized for your main keyword phrase. Radiating out from there are your mid-range, tier 2 pages. Radiating out from each of your tier 2 pages are your smaller tier 3 pages.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

Connected via links to each of your tier 3 pages are various Squidoo pages, Hubpages, other Web 2.0 platforms, Ezinearticles, you name it.

This whole configuration is like a giant network that stretches out into the Internet and gathers traffic, which it brings back to the central hub-the home page.

This is what you want to create.

This traffic source network is almost like a giant living science-fiction creature that channels whatever needs channeling back to the its center.

Or maybe like a giant, multi-dimensional octopus.

Whatever floats your boat! The thing is, this is what you want to create.

By creating multiple ways to enter your site, you multiply the amount of traffic you're going to get. You can pretend search engine optimization is a completely by the numbers endeavor. It is!...If you're Google and you know the inside and outside of the algorithms. For the rest of us, it's more of a craft or art that a science.

Let's talk about this in a little more detail.

When you keyword optimize a page for a certain keyword phrase, your goal is to get that page to rank high in the search engine results whenever anyone searches on it. What also happens, though, is that page will start ranking for phrases you haven't even thought about! This is what I call the multiplier effect.

The more links you have coming into a page, the more that page is going to rank for terms you don't even know about. This, of course, argues for lots of links and lots of content. That content can be on page, as in an authority site, or off page as in ezine type articles or Squidoo lenses that link back to your page.

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