Search engines such as Google are getting much smarter at deciding which websites to return in their results pages. Basically,they want to ensure that when people search for a term, they are able to deliver to them the best possible set of results.

As a result, more and more, they are removing websites and web site pages that they consider to be redundant,
of low qualityor providing little useful or original information to visitors from their results pages.

The point of all this is that certain methods people used to get traffic and generate large amounts of income have become redundant.
For example in the past you could create a website that automatically took copied or scraped content from other websites with the same general theme and added that to your own website. Unfortunately, that no longer works.

On the other hand, you could, create an article with your links embedded; visit websites such as ezinearticles, isnare or articlebase
and through them distribute that same article to hundreds of other websites in return for them linking to your website.
That no longer works as well either, as even though it is perfectly legal, Google considers these copies of your article to be duplicate content. Since the search engine doesn’t want its index cluttered with thousands of copies of the same information it now severely discounts these links.

Among other things, the amount of profit you can get from your website is proportional to the number of visitors that you can get to visit your site. This is in turn related to your where your site appears in search engine results pages.
It is known for example that the first website on a page of Google results get s 42% of the traffic (almost 3 times as much traffic as the second page on the list).

So the question is what does Google consider when deciding on which position to assign to any particular website?

This is a vital question to ask as your position for any keyword determines how much traffic you receive.
It has been determined that Google counts the number of times other sites link to your sites pages as being a vote for their popularity.
It also takes note of the PageRank of the page the link is on, the relevance of the keyword to your site,
as well of how relevant that keyword is in the site it appears so if your keyword is chainsaws and it appears in a website about cooking for example, Google will not give it as much value.

So what can you do to ensure your website appears high up in search engine results and increase your website traffic for free?
You should get more and more links pointing to your website.

Six ways to increase the number of links pointing to your website and boost your website traffic for free are:
1) Publish articles in article directories, but uniquely across many directories. Dont expect to receive hundreds of links from one article in a directory.
2) Publish articles on your own website. Publish lots and lots of unique articles each of them targeting particular keywords or sets of keywords.
3) Publish articles on other peoples websites with your links included.
4) Exchange links with other related sites, but always three-way, and never in exchange for money.
5) Add your site to as many business directories as you can find.
6) Link your articles together with lots of keyword based internal links pointing to each other

So basically do anything you can to get more relevant links pointing to your website while ensuring you dont violate Googles terms and conditions e.g. you must not pay a website to link to yours.
Also build your links surely and steadily at a constant rate and in a distributed manner. Google will frown on you suddenly gaining 10 high ranking links if you have only gained 20 low rank links in the last 6 months.

Above all, you need to build your own website into a massive high quality resource of useful and relevant information so that other resources link to you naturally.