Many SEO freelancers that you find on websites like Elance or Guru.com are more than willing to make unreasonable guarantees about search engine rankings and traffic. The sad fact is that there are sometimes ways to fool the search engines and get these higher rankings ” for a while.
Black Hat Seo is what this kind of strategy is called, and it is a very short sighted way to get traffic to your site. Only those who pray on short lived bursts of traffic like CPA marketers ever benefit from this technique.
Search engine optimization begins with on page factors that let the search engines know what your website is about. The website title, meta description and meta keywords should all be set to the sites main key phrase. If the websites url contains the key phrase it can give you a boost also. Msn or Bing gives a lot of weight to keyword rich urls.
Building links to your website is called off site seo. This is truly the most important factor in your websites rankings that you can control. Building one way text links from high ranking sites will improve your results dramatically.
Using the power of social bookmarking to build back links will also help your rankings. If done properly it can be very powerful in helping you rise in the eyes of the search engines. Bookmarking will also help your site get indexed faster than any other method I have found.
Article marketing will also give you text links with a lot of juice. Publishing to websites like Ezine Articles and Associated content gives you great links and can also send significant traffic to your site.
Using these techniques will definitely help your websites ranking and traffic. They are all totally legitimate and are not black hat in any way. Having a daily plan to slowly build these links is the best way to achieve the results you are looking for.