Feb 11
21
Get indexed, get ranked, get traffic
No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And the best kind of traffic is free traffic. And where’s the best place to get free traffic? Google and other search engines.
How does free search engine traffic work?
The process works in a way that you have experienced many many times. You go to Google. 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. 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. In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic. 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 that means you need to be “ranked” in the top 10 by Google. And this bring us to…
What is SEO?
SEO means that your website is clearly about something specific, Google knows that that is and thinks others will agree and find your site useful. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. But there are several things that we know for sure.
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.
In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. Links from other sites are the easiest way to accomplish this. Since some of these site will already be indexed, Google will follow the links on their pages and find you.
Twitter and Facebook updates are great places to put links to your site. Because these sites are indexed multiple times every day. And follows new links it finds immediately.
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. And it means that the content on your page matches the keywords you’re targeting. The topic of this article is clearly SEO. One reason Google knows this is because the words search engine optimization appear inside it. 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. These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.
Your links
The next thing to consider is your links. 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. With this strategy what you do is write an article about the topic you’re targeting. Then create a bunch of different versions of it. Because you’re going to post a unique copy of it to lots of different websites. The more sites you can do this for, the more links you’ll get back.
Make your site active
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. Google expects you to be updating your site regularly. RSS feeds are an easy way to keep your content changing.
But the best way is with active discussions on your page itself. 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. Visit often and make posts. Always include a link back to your site. This will get your more inbound links. And it will also get real visitors to your site.
Conclusion
All of the above is important. Unfortunately, rewriting your articles again and again. Setting up tons of profiles on forums. And posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time. Which means you probably won’t end up doing 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. This way you’ll actually do it. By taking these steps you practically ensure you’ll get free traffic from Google.
