No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And nothing beats free traffic. And where’s the best place to get free traffic? Google and other search engines.
How does free search engine traffic work?
The process works in a way that you have experienced many many times. You go to Google. Enter in a word or phrase you want to research. Then you click on one of the pages that in displayed. Well, the link you clicked on just send free traffic to that website owner. So the real question is how you get that free traffic.
If you’re like most people you only click links on the first page or two. The truth is that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. And believe it or not, the first 3 results receive over 70% of the traffic.
So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. And this bring us to…
What is search engine optimization?
SEO means that your website is clearly about something specific, Google knows that that is and thinks others will agree and find your site useful. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. But there are several things that we know for sure.
Getting indexed
Before your website can begin gaining ranking, you have to alert Google to it’s existence. This is called getting “indexed.” This is when Google looks at your site and take notes about it, which are stored in their database.
In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. Getting a link from another site will accomplish this easily. Because Google already knows about these sites, it will follow the new links to you.
Twitter and Facebook updates are great places to put links to your site. Because these sites are indexed multiple times every day. And follows new links it finds immediately.
Gaining ranking
After getting indexed, you need to work on your search engine ranking. Google has billions of pages indexed, so just getting into their database does not mean anyone will see you.
The 3 factors in getting ranked:
- Content
- Links
- Activity
Great content
This is also called on-page SEO. It’s critical that your page content is consistent with the keyword phrases you’re targeting. Clearly this article is about search engine optimization. One way Google figures this out is from the fact that it contains the term SEO. Another reason is because there are related words, like website traffic, too.
In addition to the content on the page, other things to keep in mind are the title tags on the page, and the domain name itself. Each of these plays a roles in Google determination about your site.
Link juice
The next thing to consider is your links. This includes both the inbound and outbound links. With inbound links, you want to have more coming in than going out. The more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be.
One great way to get lots of inbound links is through web 2.0 sites. To accomplish this you start by writing an article that targets the keywords you’re after. Then create a bunch of different versions of it. And post unique versions to lots of websites that accept articles. And the more you do the better.
Make your site active
The last thing we know for sure is that Google likes to see active sites. Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time. Regular content updates to your site are expected. You can do this with RSS feeds and news posts.
Comments from other people on your page are another fantastic way to keep your content updated. So, obviously, you need to get people to visit your site on your own, too. One simple method for doing this is to use forums.
What you need to do is sign up with several forums in your niche. Visit often and make posts. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This generates even more links back to your site. And it also gets people to your web page.
Conclusion
It’s important that you do everything listed here. Unfortunately, rewriting your articles again and again. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And posting your content all over the web is time consuming. And you’re already too busy, so you mostly likely will never do any of it.
Fortunately, you can get rank builder software to do all the grunt work for you. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you can. Otherwise, you won’t do it at all. And if you don’t do it, you simply will not ever get free traffic from Google.
