Perhaps, back in your younger days, you were one of the many munchkins who wrote a letter to Santa as part of the run-up Christmas.

It seemed so simple. You put together a list and — except maybe for ponies and operational light sabers — you were lucky enough to have your wishes fulfilled.

Only later did it dawn on you that your parents had something to do with this. And, if you’ve now become an e-commerce entrepreneur, it’s a bummer they don’t work for Google.

But they don’t, so it’s down to you alone to fulfill everything on your wish list.

Most likely, Item No 1 is targeted traffic, those visitors who are actively seeking what you’re offering. Lots of them.

Most importantly, you want them to return again and again and bring their friends along.

The trick, of course, is getting them to visit you in the first place.

There are many roads to success online. One of the most effective is to establish your own website as a base of operations, and that’s speaking from experience on both ends of the deal:

A solid plan for attracting traffic can contain a variety of strategies, from short-term to subtle to ongoing. If you’re going to be in business for any amount of time — and that, by definition, means being successful — then it’s strongly advisable to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), at the very least.

Just consider it as part of your analytics process.

That’s the housework of entrepreneurship, and your success mandates that it must be done. Otherwise, you’ll discover one way or another that you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

Done effectively, SEO’s advantage is it delivers visitors who are already actively seeking something, whether it’s information, entertainment, goods, or services. You don’t necessarily need to entice them with an ad or promotion.

They’re taking the first step in the buying cycle.

So make sure your website’s SEO elements are well-positioned to attract them. You can do this by conducting an SEO audit:

One of the more popular — and free — software suites to assist in your SEO audit is Ryte.

It’s a useful tool to monitor, analyze and optimize the key elements of your website:

A solid SEO strategy takes time to establish, but look at it this way: so does establishing your authority as someone your customers can trust.

An SEO audit can go a long way toward turning those two fundamentals of success into a symbiotic relationship.