It’s undeniable that the one thing you need to succeed in your online business is traffic. And nothing beats free traffic. So where do we get free traffic? Google and other search engines.
How does Google give out free traffic?
You’ve experienced this process a lot of times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter the words you’re interested in. Then you click on one of the pages that in displayed. Turns out that the website you visit just got free traffic from the search engine. What 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. And what’s more, the first 3 get over 70% of the clicks.
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. And 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. 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 known as being “indexed.” What this means is that Google visits your site and records information about it 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. 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. 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 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.
Here’s what’s important in ranking:
- Content
- Links
- Activity
SEO content
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. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. Google knows that not just because the words search engine optimization show up. Another reason is because there are related words, like website traffic, too.
The title of the page, the domain name and other pages on your site are also important. These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.
Link juice
The next thing to consider is your links. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. With inbound links, you want to have more coming in than going out. And the more inbound links the better.
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 then upload a different versions to a bunch of sites that allow you to add content. And quantity is the key here – so do lots and lots.
Increasing your activity
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. Regular content updates to your site are expected. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.
But the best way is with active discussions on your page itself. 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. Visit often and make posts. Always include a link back to your site. This will get your more inbound links. 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. Setting up tons of profiles on forums. And visiting all the sites to post up your comments and articles takes a really long time. And the bad news is that you probably won’t do it.
However, rank builder software exists. And it automates everything we’ve just talked about. So the best thing you can do is to automate this process. This way you’ll actually do it. And if you don’t do it, you simply will not ever get free traffic from Google.
