Creating and publishing a website is no longer a mysterious, esoteric task that is reserved only for computer geeks. These days, just about everyone and their dog has a website. Anyone wanting a piece of the virtual pie can easily sign up for a free Blogger blog or one of the major Web 2.0 properties like HubPages or Squidoo in about five minutes. Plus, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors available that make creating a beautiful, interactive webpage a very simple process.

One of the most popular tools for hosting a blog is WordPress, an open-source project that is freely available for the downloading. There are at least a thousand tutorials available on the 'net for how to set up a WordPress blog, configure the theme, upload it to your own hosting account, and so on. This article is not going to re-cover that ground. It has been done more than enough. The question is, what do you do once your blog is online, to get the word out so that you can get traffic?

The answer to that question is: search engine optimization. SEO is basically the process of driving traffic to your website organically (that is, not paid) from the search engines. To get the search engine "spiders" or "bots" to notice your site among the "billions and billions" of pages out on the web, and then rank it "high" in the results pages (so people will find it easily), you'll need to work on these three general tasks:

• Make sure your content is relevant to the keywords people are searching with

• Optimizing your website and its content with keyword emphasis and linking structures

• Building inbound links to your website from others, preferably those in your same niche

This article focuses on the tools that can simplify item (2) in the list. Backlinking, the process described in (3), is a subject for a whitepaper, not just a short article. And, obviously, it is up to you to be sure your content is relevant to the keywords you are attaching to your pages as mentioned in item (1); just use your common sense.

The good news is that there are any number of tools to simplify the job to improve the optimization on your website. Owing to the popularity of WordPress, an entire industry is producing add-on capabilities in specialized themes and WordPress SEO plugins to facilitate optimizing sites built with the platform. You can dig up all sorts of tools, ranging from free plugins like Platinum SEO, HeadSpace2, and Google Video Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or SEO Booster Pro.

Here is a short list of plugins you should investigate:

• SEOPressor WordPress Plugin

• Platinum SEO Pack

• All-in-One SEO Pack

• Google XML Sitemap

• Google Image Sitemap

• Google Video Sitemap

• Automatic SEO Links

• HeadSpace2

Always remember, though: put good content on your site that will provide real value for your visitors. Treat your visitors well, and you will get your fair share of traffic; just be sure to do your SEO correctly, and you can speed up the process considerably!