Posted on 7th September, 2010 | No Comment
It’s undeniable – the one thing you need to succeed in your online business is traffic. And the best kind of traffic is free traffic. Where does free traffic come from? Google and other search engines.
How does free search engine traffic work?
This is something you’ve experienced first hand countless times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter the words you’re interested in. And click one of the links that shows up. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. What need to figure out is how to get you free traffic.
Most people only click results from the first couple pages. The truth is that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. What’s even more amazing is the the first 3 links get more than 70% of the free traffic.
So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. To do that, you need to be “ranked” in Google’s Top 10 results. Which leads to..
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a measure of how well Google and other search engines think your website matches the search terms people are typing into their search boxes. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. However there are several things that we know for sure.
Getting indexed
Before you can get ranked, Google has to first know your site exists. This is called getting “indexed.” What this means is that Google’s spiders visit your site and records information about it in their database.
In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. And the best way for Google to find you is to get inbound links from other sites. Since some of these sites will already be indexed, Google will follow the links on their pages and find you. Cool.
Use your Twitter and Facebook updates to get quick indexed links to your site. These sites are indexed multiple times every day. So your new link will get indexed very quickly.
Gaining ranking
Once you have been indexed, you will start working on increasing your ranking. Just getting indexed once does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.
There are three components of gaining ranking: they are:
- Content
- Links
- Activity
Content strategies
This is the SEO work you do on your page. It means that the content on your page matches the keywords you’re targeting. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. One reason Google knows this is because the words search engine optimization appear inside it. And another way this is determined is by the other related phrases like traffic generation that are also in the article.
The title of the page, the domain name and other pages on your site are also important. Each of these plays a roles in Google determination about your site.
Your links
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. So the number of inbound links is important.
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 you have to create multiple versions of this articles. Because you’re going to post a unique copy of it to lots of different websites. And quantity is the key here – so do lots and lots.
Increasing your activity
Finally, we know that Google gives you credit for the activity on your site. Static pages that just sit there may rank at first, but will fall off over time. Google expects you to be updating your site regularly. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.
Another great way to keep your page content fresh is to enable comments on it and allow others to discuss your page topic. To get comments from others, you need to get others to visit your site. An easy way to do this is from forums.
Set up forum profiles with the ones related to your website. Visit often and make posts that are helpful. Always include a link back to your site. This generates even more links back to your site. And it gets people to visit the site you link to.
Conclusion
All of the above is important. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. Setting up tons of profiles on forums. And posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time. And you’re already too busy, so you mostly likely will never get to doing any of it.
However, rank builder software exists. And it automates everything we’ve just talked about. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you possibly can. And then you’ll besure to get it done. Not doing it means you will never get free traffic from Google.
