The best kind of traffic is free traffic.
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 times.
You go to Google, enter in a word or phrase you want to research, and click one of the links that shows up.
Well, the link you clicked on just sent free traffic to that website owner.
What we need to figure out is how to get YOU free traffic.
Most people only click results from the first couple pages.
In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic.
Believe it or not, the first 3 results receive over 70% of the traffic.
So to get any significant amount of free traffic from Google, you really need to be on the first page.
This means Google needs to "rank" you as a top 10 result.
This bring us 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.
It's a complex formula that only people working for Google know exactly.
There are several factors that we do know.
Getting Indexed Before your website can begin gaining ranking, you have to alert Google to it's existence.
This is known as being "indexed.
" When your website gets indexed, Google stores information about it in their massive database.
In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you.
Links from other sites are the easiest way to accomplish this.
Google will actually follow the links on sites it already has indexed to find new sites and index them.
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 After this first hurdle, you need to start gaining ranking.
Due to the massive size of the Google database - literally billions of pages - just getting indexed doesn't do much for you.
Here's what's important in ranking:
- Content
- Links
- Activity
It's critical that your page content is consistent with the keyword phrases you're targeting.
Clearly this article is about search engine optimization.
Google knows that not just because the words search engine optimization show up.
Another way this is determined is by the other related phrases like traffic generation that are also in the article.
You also need to make sure the title tags, outbound links and the domain itself match the topic of the page.
These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.
Your Links Next, you need to pay attention to the links to and from your site.
The links to your site, as well as the sites you link to are important.
You want to make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links.
And the more inbound links the better.
Article marketing is a super easy way to get a bunch of inbound links.
To accomplish this you start by writing an article that targets the keywords you're after.
Then you continue to create articles around these and other related keywords for ever increasing back-links.
The more quality articles you write, the more links you'll get back.
Make Your Site Active Lastly, it's seems clear that Google expects important pages to be actively updated.
Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time, so you need to update your pages often.
RSS feeds are an easy way to keep your content changing.
Another great way to keep your page content fresh is to enable comments on it and allow others to discuss your page topic.
This means you need to get real live people to your site, as well.
An easy way to do this is from forums.
Set up forum profiles with the ones related to your website and post there often.
Put a link to your site in your profile.
This gets you inbound links and it will also get real visitors to your site.
Conclusion It's important that you do everything listed here.
But let's face it, writing article after article, creating a bunch of forum profiles, and posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time which means you probably will end up NOT doing it.
Fortunately, you can get rank builder software to do all the grunt work for you.
The best thing you can do is to automate this process.
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.