Get indexed, get ranked, get traffic

It’s undeniable that the one thing you need to succeed in your online business is traffic. And free traffic beats everything else. Where does free traffic come from? Google and other search engines.

How do we get free traffic from Google?

You’ve experienced this process a lot of times. You load up Google or another 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. 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. 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. To do that, you need to be “ranked” in Google’s Top 10 results. 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. It’s a complex formula that only people working for Google know exactly. 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 called getting “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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

Your links

The next thing to consider is your links. The links to your site, as well as the sites you link to are important. With inbound links, you want to have more coming in than going out. And the more inbound links the better.

Article spinning is a super easy way to get a bunch of inbound links. 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 quantity is the key here – so do lots and lots.

Increasing your activity

And lastly, it’s seems clear that Google expects important pages to be actively updated. Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time. Google expects you to be updating your site regularly. 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. So, obviously, you need to get people to visit your site on your own, too. 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. And link back to yourself in your signature file. This gets you inbound links. And it will also get real visitors to your site.

Conclusion

It’s important that you do everything listed here. Unfortunately, rewriting your articles again and again. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And posting your content all over the web is time consuming. Which means you probably won’t end up doing 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. This way you’ll actually do it. And not doing it means you will never get free traffic from Google.

Traffic Generation Tips

The most important thing in any web business is traffic – lots and lots of traffic. Of course you also need to have a valuable offer for your visitors – a reason for them to transact with you. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.

Let’s talk about how to generate traffic…

These are the best and fastest ways to get free visitors coming to your site:

  • Web 2.0 Methods
  • Articles Directories
  • Video

And here’s how to use each method…

Web 2.0 Sites

By web 2.0 we mean any site where the users actually create the content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. The benefit of this to you is that your content is now considered as part of these sites. So, if you place links to your own site inside your content, you get a search engine ranking benefit from those links. The direct traffic from the Web 2.0 sites themselves is only part of the benefit. How to generate web 2.0 traffic is something we’ve only scratched the surface on. I don’t want to be exhaustive – I want to give you an overview of all the methods…

Articles Sites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. In typical web 2.0 fashion, article sites rely on user-generated content (i.e. your articles). And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. And the hidden benefit here is that your reach grows as other people take your articles and put them on their blogs and sites. And in return for getting to use your content, these other users include links back to your website that gives you further search engine ranking and more free traffic. Here are a couple article marketing traffic tips:

  • Do your keyword research
  • Write specifically to target these keywords
  • Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video

And finally, we need to talk about getting traffic from videos. Here to we’re really looking at a web 2.0 sub-category. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

Here are just a few video marketing tips:

  • Set up your YouTube account
  • When people view your videos, you want them to visit your site, so turn all the other modules in your profile off
  • Add tags to your profile
  • Include a link to your main site in your profile
  • Upload at least 1 video
  • In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Putting it all together.

If you want to get traffic to your site, then follow the advice in this article.

Traffic is King, but this comes FIRST

Visitors to your site are critical – getting them there automatically is even better. Here’s how…

Traffic is useless . . . unless…

The first thing you need to do before you start going after any traffic is keyword research. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. Which means you need to put some thought into the keywords you’re targeting.

Here are the important considerations for your research:

  • Will you be able to rank for these keywords? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
  • Are these “buying” keywords? Certain keywords are good for generating a lot of visitors who don’t buy anything. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
  • Another thing to think about is affiliates. Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. And hiring an expert is very expensive. Which is why practically none of your competitors will do this! The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Only after doing your keyword research correctly can you start targeting these keywords to get you traffic.

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

  • Surveys
  • “Help” Websites
  • Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

Here’s the thing – people love surveys. It’s human nature. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. Think about that – you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! This is a sneaky little idea that most people never even think of. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Help” Websites

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. But a much smarter method is to use website traffic software to do it for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. These sites generate massive traffic and people watch over 2 billion videos a day on YouTube alone . If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.

Even if you don’t think you can make a good video. One super easy thing to do is take an article or website you’ve written. And use free screen capture software to record yourself reading it. You can even get software that will automatically do this for you.

In Closing

It’s not that hard to get traffic to your websites. Use your noodle and come up with things other people aren’t doing. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

Don’t waste any more time:

  • Do your keyword research
  • Next, set up a survey or two with viral appeal
  • Take advantage of the “help” sites
  • Capitalize on video!