Here is a website traffic strategy that takes less than 90 minutes to implement, but generates free website traffic on an ongoing basis – potentially for years.

It operates on the principle that “long tail” keywords have very low competition, so your ability to rank on the first page of the search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN is not only easy, but fast as well.

Here is how you do it:

Use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker.com to research keywords related to the topic of your website. Use their “competition search” function in order to find out the number of competing websites on Google. (For more details on how to do this, click the link at the end of this article for a free resource guide.)

Browse through the keyword results and look for keywords with a predicted 24-hour search volume greater than 10, but with a “google” competing pages count of less than 1000.

Why a competition rate of 1000? Isn’t that a lot? Well surprisingly enough, the number of supposedly-competing pages is not really representative of the true number of pages actively trying to rank high for any given term.

The number simply represents how many web pages happen to contain the particular keyword phrase we’re looking at. In fact, taking any given competition number, probably as few as 1% of those web pages are actively trying to rank high for that keyword. That means that if there are 1,000 web pages bearing a particular keyword, only perhaps 10 of them are actively competing for it.

Thus with fewer than 10 active competitors, the prospect of ranking on the first page (i.e. the top 10) of search results is very good.

Let’s look at an example.

Suppose we do some keyword research for the keyword phrase “dog food.” Wordtracker shows that there will be a predicted 1358 searches every day for that term. However, there are 1.6 million competing web pages. For sure, ranking on the first page for that term could be a “home run” in terms of traffic, but there would be an enormous amount of competition for that first page. Even 1% of 1.6 million is still 16,000 active competitors.

The chances of outranking 15,990 of them are slim to none. This is a polite way of saying that shooting for that particular term is a gigantic waste of time. The predicted search volume of 1358 searches per day is a red herring. It’s distracting. It’s irrelevant. It only matters to the top 10 web pages, and that isn’t going to be you. So don’t let it sway you into wasting time targeting that keyword.

Instead, consider some of the “long tail” keyword phrases, their predicted daily search volume, and their competing web pages:

“top ten dog foods”, 88 searches/day, 1040 competing web pages
“hypoallergenic dog food”, 86 searches/day, 539 competing web pages
“best dog foods ranked”, 86 searches/day, 1010 competing web pages
“best dry dog food”, 70 searches/day, 511 competing web pages
“dog raw food diet”, 68 searches/day, 333 competing web pages
“recipes for homemade dog foods”, 67 searches/day, 110 competing web pages

And the list goes on. And on.

So, just for these 6 terms alone, there are an estimated 465 searches per day. If you could rank on the first page of the search results, how much traffic do you think you’d get? Well clearly it would depend on whether you were in the first one or two spots, or lower down the page. But assuming just 10% of the searchers visited your website, that’s still 46 visitors per day just by targeting 6 achievable keywords.

Think how much traffic you’d get if you targeted 60. Or 600.

But before we get too carried away, we have to talk about two more steps. Knowing what keywords to target is crucial, but actually doing the work to compete for them is what makes everything work.

First, you need to create a web page on your website that caters to the desired term. Your best results will come if you “theme” your website, so that all the web pages that talk about dog food, for example, link only to other pages that talk about dog food, and not to any other topics or websites.

Then on the specific page in question, you need to create some content. Not necessarily a huge amount – but some. You need to include the keyword phrase you are targeting in the Title tag of your web page, and again a number of times in the text on your web page. Don’t over-do it, but just write naturally using your keyword whenever it makes sense to do so.

Don’t over-think your web content. It’s important, but not critical. The really important bit comes next.

Write an article. Make it 400-600 words and write it “about” whatever keyword phrase you want to target. At the end of the article, you have a “resource box” in which you can place a link back to your website. Instead of merely linking to your domain name, link directly to the keyword-specific page you just created. And when forming the link, ensure that the keyword phrase appears in the text of the link (called the “anchor text”).

Then distribute your article to article sites around the Internet. You can submit it to sites like ezinearticles.com and isnare.com for good exposure. You can also sign up for a service such as articlemarketer.com for maximum exposure.

Over the coming weeks, your article will be picked up by dozens – perhaps hundreds – of websites, all linking back to your new web page. It won’t be long before your new web page rockets to the top of the search engines.

So, how much of your time does this whole operation take? It depends. Probably less than 90 minutes. Keyword research takes about 10 minutes, writing web page content about 20 minutes, and writing and distributing a short article about an hour.

Of course, it won’t be long before you’ll want to hire out the task of article and content writing. This way you’ll get far more web pages done because you’ll have other people doing the work. Elance.com or rentacoder.com are excellent venues to find writers who will create content and articles for you for between $5 and $10 per article.

This strategy is tremendously scaleable and can bring you an enormous amount of free website traffic. It has brought success to many an Internet marketer, and it will for you too if you simply follow it. There are new keywords and phrases being used every day as new products are invented and new ideas become popular. This means that the supply of achievable “long tail” keywords will never be exhausted and you can have as much free website traffic as you want.

Jason Jantzi has used SEO to promote over 50 digital products online. Download his free blueprint showing 130 key tools from how to create digital products in under an hour to search engine optimization reviews.