Get indexed, get ranked, get traffic
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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?
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. Then you click on one of the pages that in displayed. 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. In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic. 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. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. 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 intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. There are several factors that we do know.
Getting indexed
Before you can get ranked, Google has to first know your site exists. This is called getting “indexed.” What this means is that Google visits your site and records information about it in their database.
Google needs to actually find your site in order to index it. Getting a link from another site will accomplish this easily. Google will actually follow the links on sites it already has indexed to find new sites and index them.
Twitter and Facebook updates are great places to put links to your site. Google visits these sites many times every day. So your new link will get indexed very quickly.
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.
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. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. Google knows that not just because the words search engine optimization show up. 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. Each of these plays a roles in Google determination about your site.
Your links
The next thing to consider is your links. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. You want to make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links. 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 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. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.
Comments from other people on your page are another fantastic way to keep your content updated. This means you need to get real live people to your site, as well. One simple method for doing this is to use forums.
Create profiles on lots of forums about your site’s topic. Visit often and make posts. 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.
The good news is that there are automated software programs out there that will do this for you. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you can. This way you’ll actually do it. By taking these steps you practically ensure you’ll get free traffic from Google.