No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And the best kind of traffic is free traffic. And where’s the best place to get free traffic? Google and other search engines.
How does Google give out free traffic?
This is something you’ve experienced first hand countless times. You load up Google or another search engine. Enter in a word or phrase you want to research. And then you visit one or more of the sites that show up. Turns out that the website you visit just got free traffic from the search engine. We will be discussing here how to get website traffic to you for free.
Most people only click results from the first couple pages. Actually, almost 100% of the free traffic goes to this first page of results. And what’s more, the first 3 get over 70% of the clicks.
This means that to get any real traffic you need to be on the first page in Google. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. Which brings up..
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. 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.” 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. Links from other sites are the easiest way to accomplish this. Since some of these site will already be indexed, Google will follow the links on their pages and find you.
Twitter and Facebook updates are great places to put links to your site. These sites are very popular so Google indexes them multiple times a day. So any new links will be followed right away.
Gaining ranking
After this first hurdle, you need to start gaining ranking. Just getting indexed does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.
The 3 factors in getting ranked:
- Content
- Links
- Activity
Content strategies
This is the SEO you do on your site itself. And it means that the content on your page matches the keywords 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 strategy
Next, you need to pay attention to the links to and from your site. This includes both the inbound and outbound links. You want to make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links. 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. You have to also write several different versions of your articles. Because you’re going to post a unique copy of it to lots of different websites. And the more you do the better.
Make your site active
And lastly, it’s seems clear that Google expects important pages to be actively updated. A page that was created 3 years ago and hasn’t been touched since won’t rank well. So you need to update your pages often. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.
Comments from other people on your page are another fantastic way to keep your content updated. This means you need to get real live people to your site, as well. An easy way to do this is from forums.
What you need to do is sign up with several forums in your niche. And post their often. Always include a link back to your site. 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 multiple versions of the same article. Setting up tons of profiles on forums. And posting your content all over the web is time consuming. And the bad news is that you probably won’t do it.
Fortunately, you can get rank builder software to do all the grunt work for you. So the best thing you can do is to automate this process. And then you’re sure to get it done. And if you don’t do it, you simply will not ever get free traffic from Google.
