I just want to backtrack for a second and talk about search engines. Ultimately, if you’re going to make some passive income online, you want to have your site ranking highly for some key words or phrases in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

While traffic is the basis for all your success online, the best way to get that traffic is through the major search engines. Otherwise, you’re going to be fighting for scraps. Once your site is up and running you will notice that 75% of your visitors arrive via the search engines. In other words, they have typed in a word or phrase and your site has shown up in the SERPs (search engine results page). The other 25% will be made up of direct links from other sites, people typing in your website manually (or from bookmarks), social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon, and a smattering of traffic from some of the lesser known search engines.

Initially, your website is going to start showing up for obscure phrases. These are phrases that most people don’t type in. Sometimes they’re even misspelled words. These are search terms that are one-offs and are likely not entered by any more than a few people, if that. Because there is probably no competition for this term and you just happen to have it in your content or title, your website will be at the top of the search engine results page. Before you get too excited, it doesn’t really mean much because of the low search volume.

In the beginning, most of the search engine traffic will consist of “one off” search terms. This can actually add up to a decent volume if you have a lot of content. However, it’s a little disappointing when you look at your stats and you see that you have a hundred single searches for all kinds of strange search terms. Oh well, you’ve got to start somewhere and it’s better than nothing.

The best thing you can do right now is to keep writing content and trying to get the links to your site. Of course, you want to start including more popular keywords in your content and titles. These are the more popular search terms that the majority of people type in to the search engines.

Every time you write some new content, your site should get crawled by the search engine robots. They keep a record of this content and when someone types in a keyword that is a good match for your content, they will show your site higher up in the search engine results page.

Unfortunately, the more popular a search term is, the more competing websites there will be. For very popular terms, only the higher ranked sites will appear on the first page. Because your site won’t be considered important enough to rank for a very popular search word (or keyword), you will be buried under pages and pages of results from other websites. Think of it as one big popularity contest – and you’re not popular – yet.

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