Get Tons of Free Organic Google Traffic!
There are no secrets to getting plenty of free
search engine traffic. Provide what people are searching for in the form
of high quality content, and lots of it. The old saying that content is
king is still true. You do need high quality content, and content that
people are searching for. Fortunately there are ways to find out what
it is people are searching for, and we can briefly examine them.
After you’ve chosen a topic, hopefully a topic that
a lot of people are interested in, you will need to find out exactly
what key words and key word phrases people use when searching for
information about your topic. This can be done with one of several
keyword tools that are available online. By using the keyword tools you
can find out what groups of words are really used by searchers, and
which ones are wastes of time. If no one searches for a phrase, then
ranking number one on Google for that phrase won’t do you a bit of
good. The keyword research tools provide you with all kinds of ways of
finding out what key words to optimize for and they even tell you how
hard it will be to achieve a high ranking in the search engines with a
particular word or phrase.
Before we get any further I would like to point out
that the goal of the search engines is to find the most relevant results
of the search for the HUMAN doing the search. The search engines are
pretty smart, and getting smarter all the time. They are looking for
high quality content, but even the best search engine software cannot
determine easily whether content is of high quality nor not. However
there are clues and things the search engines can base decisions about
the quality of the content on, both on the page and off.
For instance, the engines can determine that the
text has a large number of spelling errors, something you would not
expect to find with great content. Even grammar and punctuation can be
taken into consideration.
Search engines cannot read images. To get the
attention of the engines you need text, and lots of it. I like to use
500 to 800 words per web page. The more pages the better. Each page
should be optimized for two or three keyword phrases. It’s very
important to write for humans, not for search engines…they can tell the
difference. Make sure you run your work through a spell checker, and
better yet, a word processor that will check your grammar as well. And
don’t forget to check the punctuation. If, in the eyes of the search
engines, two sites have nearly identical quality scores and one has poor
grammar or punctuation and the other doesn’t, then guess who gets the
higher ranking.
Keep it simple! I’m sure there are a lot of great
sites with great content and high rankings that are not simple. But
unless you are into that stuff there is no need. Chances are a human
searching for information about a topic would prefer a simple site that
is easy to navigate, easy to read, and easy to locate the desired
information on, than a fancy sight with lots of graphics and or flash
etc.
Use a logical linking scheme for your site’s
internal links. The engines will be examining your links for clues about
which pages are the most important and what your topic is. They must
also be able to follow the links if you want your pages listed in the
search engine results. Put some of your keywords in the link text, and
in the text surrounding the link. But don’t get crazy, just a light
sprinkling of key word phrases will do the trick.
Avoid using single-word keywords. Not only is it
easier to get good rankings for multiple word keyword phrases, the
traffic you get will be more tightly targeted and you should therefore
get more sales or signups or whatever the goal of your site is.
Make use of the bold and heading tags to present a
hierarchy of the importance of your content to the engines.
Avoid cluttering up your pages with advertisements
and links. Page clutter is something the engines can determine. They
can look at the ratio of ad links to text, total number of links,
graphics placements, what is above the fold on a page, and lots more.
This is another reason to keep your pages and navigation clean and
simple. Oh yeah, humans like clean and simple too.
Include a few images and work some keywords into
the image alt tags. Some of my sites get a surprising amount of traffic
from Google’s image search. So put text in the alt image tag that is
related to the picture, perhaps get it into the file name for the image,
and in some nearby text, which can help Google figure out what the image
is about.
Once you have your high quality content in place
with your simple and straight forward site navigation worked out, it’s
time to look at what you can do to obtain some good links to your site
from other quality sites. After all, there could be thousands of pages
of pretty much identical information about any given topic online, and
how is a search engine to figure out which is the best? One way is to
evaluate the quantity and quality of income links to your site from
other sites.
High quality content will attract some links, but
if you actively seek out links from other quality sites you can speed
things up. Avoid linking with large numbers of sites in a short amount
of time, like what happens when you join a link farm. Google prefers to
see a slow steady increase in links as though it were a natural human
endeavor. If a huge number of links pops up overnight Google doesn’t
count them as very important. The same is true if huge numbers of links
have identical link text. Google will take note and reduce their value.
The more pages you have, the better your chances of
being included in the search results from those billions of daily
searches, and thus the more traffic you will receive. It’s all just a
numbers game.
Once you have all of that stuff in place, then you
have to wait. Typically with a new site, you may get a little initial
activity through Google for a few weeks, then you will drop off the map
for up to a year with Google. That is what is known as being in
Google’s sand box. After a year or so your site will start being listed
in the search results and things will start looking up.
Get online and investigate those keyword tools so
you can choose a great niche topic for your next website.
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