One place you can get a powerful backlink to your own website is the revenue sharing site Triond. It's like an article directory, but you don't put the links in an author bio-box. You can put them in the body of the article, and they are "dofollow" so they do pass on search engine juice.

Triond has various sub-sites that all have their own unique domains. One of these, Trifter, looks like a good place to submit something if you are seeking geo-specific traffic. It's the place for travel related articles, and there's a section for Australia.

Obviously, submitting something there would be most appropriate if you have a specifically location-oriented website such as an entertainment guide for a city or town. But other kinds of websites would still benefit.

You've just got to find a local angle. So, say you have a website for a surf shop. You could write an article about all the best surf beaches in that city.

The trick is to include information that is good, unique and relevant, and not just make your article a shameless puff piece. That way you're offering the reader something worthwhile, and the backlink you include is appropriate even if it isn't demonstrably useful.

As you crawl up the rankings for different keywords you notice how various spelling versions rank differently. For example, for this main site, I rank pretty highly for "SEO tips". That's because that acronym is in the actual URL, and because I've got a reasonable number of backlinks out there with it in the anchor text.

In recent months I started getting some Google traffic from the phrase "search engine optimisation tips" even though I hadn't targeted that at all. Presumably this was because the search engine is pretty smart and knows what the acronym stands for. But remember there are two ways to spell the word "optimisation" -- one with an "s" and one with a "z". And at that point I hadn't had any visitors arrive via searches for the latter version.

So I've done a bit of backlink building over recent weeks, alternating between the two versions in the anchor text. I'm now on page one for both of them, and getting a couple more hits a day on average. Sure, that's not much, but every little bit helps. And it will build as I keep chipping away.

So, there's definitely something to remember there. If you're targeting a keyword phrase, see if there's an acronym for it. And also look for different ways to spell it. Then build links using all those different versions. You could end up drawing in quite a bit of extra search engine traffic as a result.

It's certainly a great feeling to get onto the first page of Google's search engine results for your chosen keyword or phrase. As long as it has decent search volume, you're sure to get a constant flow of trageted traffic as a result. (And even if you get hardly any, it still proves that you're doing something right!)

But your ultimate goal should always be to rise to the very top of the page -- preferably in the top three positions -- since this is when you really notice the benefits. A study carried out earlier this year showed that when combined these three slots get well over half of all the clicks from people viewing the results. Not surprisingly, there was significant variation between these three places also:

Websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent; and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent. Being number one in Google, according to Optify, is the equivalent of all the traffic going to the sites appearing in the second through fifth positions.

I have noticed this very effect in action just recently. I was sitting in third place for a nice two word phrase that was bringing several hits a day to the main domain of this site. Recently, I moved into second place for it. It's quite remarkable what a boost that change has given me. If I do get into the top spot, well, that will be fantastic!