There is no doubt that website traffic is critical to your business success. And free traffic beats everything else. Where does free traffic come from? Google and other search engines.
How does Google give out free traffic?
The process works in a way that you have experienced many many times. You load up Google or another search engine. Type in something you’re looking for. And then you visit one or more of the sites that show 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. Actually, almost 100% of the free traffic goes to this first page of results. And believe it or not, the first 3 results receive over 70% of the traffic.
This means that to get any real traffic you need to be on the first page in 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. The formula Google uses to determine this is known only 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. Google will actually follow the links on sites it already has indexed to find new sites and index them.
A couple of great places to do this are in your Twitter or Facebook profiles. These sites are very popular so Google indexes them multiple times a day. And follows new links it finds immediately.
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.
There are three components of gaining ranking:
- Content
- Links
- Activity
SEO content
This is also called on-page SEO. You need to make sure your content matches the search terms you’re going after. Clearly this article is about search engine optimization. Google knows that not just because the words search engine optimization show up. But also because other related words like traffic generation show up in it, as well.
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. These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.
Link juice
The next thing to consider is your links. This includes both the inbound and outbound links. You want to make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links. And the more inbound links the better.
A very easy way to get a lot of links to your site is through article marketing. To use this technique you write articles related to the topic of your websites. You have to also write several different versions of your articles. And then upload a different versions to a bunch of sites that allow you to add content. And the more you do the better.
Increasing your activity
The last thing we know for sure is that Google likes to see active sites. 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. You can do this with RSS feeds and news posts.
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.
Create profiles on lots of forums about your site’s topic. Then become active in the forum. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This generates even more links back to your site. And it will also get real visitors to your site.
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 visiting all the sites to post up your comments and articles takes a really long time. And you’re already too busy, so you mostly likely will never do 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 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.