There is no doubt that website traffic is critical to your business success. And nothing beats free traffic. Where does free traffic come from? 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. Well, the link you clicked on just send free traffic to that website owner. We will be discussing here how to get website traffic to you for free.
If you’re like most people you only click links on the first page or two. The truth is
that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. And what’s more, the first 3 get over 70% of the clicks.
So to get any significant amount of free traffic from Google, you really need to be on the first page. And that means you need to be “ranked” in the top 10 by Google. And this bring us to…
What is search engine optimization?
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. But 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 known as being “indexed.” When your website gets indexed, Google stores information about it in their massive database.
Google needs to actually find your site in order to index it. And the best way for Google to find you is to get inbound links from other sites. 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. Because these sites are indexed multiple times every day. And follows new links it finds immediately.
Gaining ranking
Once you have been indexed, you will start working on increasing your rank. Just getting indexed does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.
There are three components of gaining ranking:
- Content
- Links
- Activity
Optimized 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. One way Google figures this out is from the fact that it contains the term SEO. 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.
Link strategy
The second factor is your linking. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. It’s very important that you have more links coming in than you have going out. The more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be.
A very easy way to get a lot of links to your site is through article marketing. 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 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. So you need to update your pages often. You can do this with RSS feeds and news posts.
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. 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
Each step listed above is critical. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. 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.
The good news is that there are automated software programs out there that will do this for you. So the best thing you can do is to automate this process. And then you’re sure to get it done. By taking these steps you practically ensure you’ll get free traffic from Google.
