Get indexed, get ranked, get traffic
No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And free traffic beats everything else. So where do we get free traffic? Google and other search engines.
How do we get free traffic from Google?
The process works in a way that you have experienced many many times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter the words you’re interested in. And click one of the links that shows up. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. What need to figure out is how to get you free traffic.
If you’re like most people you only click links on the first page or two. Actually, almost 100% of the free traffic goes to this first page of results. What’s even more amazing is the the first 3 links get more than 70% of the free traffic.
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 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. However, we do know a few things that count.
Getting indexed
Before your website can begin gaining ranking, you have to alert Google to it’s existence. 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. Getting a link from another site will accomplish this easily. Since some of these site will already be indexed, Google will follow the links on their pages and find you.
A couple of great places to do this are in your Twitter or Facebook profiles. Google visits these sites many 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. 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
Great content
This is the SEO you do on your site itself. It’s critical that your page content is consistent with the keyword phrases you’re targeting. Clearly this article is about search engine optimization. One reason Google knows this is because the words search engine optimization appear inside it. 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. Google uses all of this content to figure out what your site is really about.
Link juice
The second factor is your linking. 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. So the number of inbound links is important.
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 post unique versions to lots of websites that accept articles. And the more you do the better.
Getting 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. 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. So, obviously, you need to get people to visit your site on your own, too. Online forums are simple source of real live visitors.
What you need to do is sign up with several forums in your niche. And post their often. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This generates even more links back to your site. And it also gets people to your web page.
Conclusion
All of the above is important. Unfortunately, rewriting your articles again and again. Creating profiles on a ton of forums. 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.
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. Otherwise, you won’t do it at all. By taking these steps you practically ensure you’ll get free traffic from Google.
