The Keen Marketer

There is no doubt that website traffic is critical to your business success. And nothing beats free traffic. So where do we get free traffic? Google and other search engines. But getting it done right from the start is key.

How do we get free traffic from Google?

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 click one of the links that shows up. 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. The truth is that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. And believe it or not, the first 3 results receive over 70% of the traffic.

So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. And this bring us to…

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization means that Google thinks your site matches what people are typing into their search box. The formula Google uses to determine this is known only by Google. There are several factors that we do know.

Getting indexed

First, before you can get ranked highly, Google has to know you exist. 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.

To get indexed, you have to help Google find your site. And the best way for Google to find you is to get inbound links from other sites. 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. Google visits these sites many times every 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.

Here’s what’s important in ranking:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

Optimized content

This is the SEO work you do on your page. It’s critical that your page content is consistent with the keyword phrases you’re targeting. The topic of this article is clearly SEO. 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.

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

The second factor is your linking. The links to your site, as well as the sites you link to are important. 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. With this strategy what you do is write an article about the topic you’re targeting. 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

Finally, we know that Google gives you credit for the activity on your site. You can’t just put up a page and leave it alone and expect it to rank well. Regular content updates to your site are expected. You can do this with RSS feeds and news posts.

Comments from other people on your page are another fantastic way to keep your content updated. To get comments from others, you need to get others to visit your site. One simple method for doing this is to use forums.

Set up forum profiles with the ones related to your website. And post their often. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This gets you inbound links. And it also gets people to your web page.

Conclusion

Each step listed above is critical. 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 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 my best advice is to automate as much of this as you can. 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.