Have you ever purchased website traffic and waited in anticipation for a surge of sales or sign-ups the minute that traffic starts to reach your website, only to experience disappointment when you find that you had little or no change in sign-ups, sales or home business income?

The reason for this is possibly the fact that the traffic you purchased was not targeted. In other words your site did not offer what the visitors were looking for, so there would be little chance of attracting sign-ups or making sales to increase your home business income.

Two sure ways of attracting free targeted traffic to your website are back-links to your site from marketing and distributing articles that you have personally written, and optimizing your web pages for the keyword phrases you have chosen in order to achieve high search engine rankings.

Both of these methods are a free way of boosting your home business income and if you are prepared to do the work you could not ask for more highly targeted traffic than is generated from these two sources.

1. Search Engine Optimization

This is so vitally important if you want your website to appear on the first page of the search results. The traffic you attract is highly targeted as the visitors will be typing in the keywords that you have optimized your site for. In other words your site will offer exactly what the visitor is looking for.

As long as you own your own domain you will be able to optimize your own site. It is not difficult you just need to put your mind to it. Firstly, you will need to learn some basic html and secondly there are many free resources to guide you through the basics of optimization. You do not need to be a SEO expert.

Continue adding fresh content to your website as well as tweaking it here and there to stay ahead of the competition and maintain a high ranking in the search results.

2. Article Marketing

Article Marketing is a very valuable source of free targeted traffic as you can literally steer the visitors to your website by regularly writing articles based on the theme of your website and using the same keywords and phrases that you have optimized your site for.

Be sure to add your website url to the Author`s Resource Box, as well as hyperlink a keyword/phrase that creates a back link to your website. The reason I advise that you actually show your url in the Author`s box is because you never know where your article will end up and sometimes the html gets stripped out and in so doing the hyperlink to your site will be lost, but if your website url is visible, your website can still be found.

Submit your original articles to as many article directories as you possibly can either manually or by using a directory submitter. Your articles will then get indexed by the search engines and will appear in the search results for the keywords you have used in the article.

Finally......... what could be more exciting than typing your keywords into the search box of Google to find that you occupy 5 or more of the 10 slots on page 1, with not only your website but also a variety of your articles from different article directories, all with links pointing to your website - a sure fire way to boost your home business income.