What all factors are responsible for getting higher ranking and good traffic for a website?

[Jake]

Search engines want to see original quality content, and some links from other sites authentically interested in your site. SEO, originally about making your content easily accessible by the search spiders has morphed into a game of fooling the search engines, getting or paying for backlinks from other sites to pump up the popularity factor, when everyone else plays the game, you have to participate to avoid being buried in obscurity, but Google continues to demonstrate an interest in site quality and is discrediting more baclinks found to be unnatural. The SEO game has to be played with subtlety.

You should employ the available tools, including the Google keyword tool to generate a list of perhaps 50 keyword phrases you should rank for, search rank tracking tools that find your current ranking for each of the keywords on your list, use backlink reporting sites to examine the competitors backlinks, often you can't actually get links from the same sources but the information gives you a target you must match or exceed.


Keyword finder (use [exact] and local options for best accuracy)
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Rank checkers include the free rankchecker for firefox http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/ to generate a search ranking report for the list of keywords, the latter has some other analysis functions.

opensiteexplorer,org and backlinkwatch,con are example backlink checking tools, knowing the page rank of the page linking to you and the number o other outgoing links on he page matter.

dropmylink.com is an aid to searching for easy but low value relevant backlinks.