How can you drive “free” traffic to your blog? You can’t. But that’s only because nothing is really free. In the end you can either buy traffic with money or you can buy traffic by investing time. Time IS money, hence my statement that there’s no free traffic.
If your goal is to drive traffic to your blog and pay for it with an investment of your time, instead of with gold or coin of the realm, then you’re in luck because that is entirely possible if you are ingenious enough to figure out the best ways to do it.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a foreign field to a lot of people. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t get asked a few questions on the subject. So I’ve decided to post this FAQ article in the hopes that it will help people understand the basics, and make them a little more comfortable with the whole domain.
Q: Why are search engines important to me?
A: 85% of all website traffic is driven by search engines. The only online activity more popular than search is email. 79.2% of US users don’t go to page 2 of search results. 42% of users click on the no.1 result. For the under-40 age-group, the Internet will become the most used media in the next 2-3 years.
Q: How do search engines decide on their rankings?
Google Sandbox is applied on new websites, it determines the timing of site inclusion as well as ranking in Google search engine results (SERPS).
This process could take up to 6-8 months, which could be against your plans causing frustration to webmasters.
The question is what is to be done during the time in which websites are in Google Sandbox?
Do not waste time on checking your website listings in results page instead emphasize on SEO methods to accelerate your listings & improve status of ranking results.
Also make efforts to appear on other major search engines such as MSN & Yahoo since they do not have sandbox like Google, this will help drive traffic to your website while waiting for Googlebot to index your pages.
Drive Visitors To Your Website And Increase Your Market Share.
SEO is the key to unlocking your website’s full potential. Google handles over 200 million internet search requests each day, and people who search for information clearly express what they want. Imagine capturing a relevant stream of such web traffic. It’s therefore important to optimize your web pages to improve search engine rankings using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.
The search engine optimization process begins before you start building your website, when you decide on the domain name to register. The process then continues on as long as your website remains online.
The SEO plan is the document that you’ll use to stay on track as you try to implement SEO strategies on your site.For many people, the thought of implementing SEO on a web site that includes dozens or even hundreds of pages is overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be, though.
Prioritizing pages
Look at SEO in small, bite-size pieces. For example, instead of looking at your site as a whole, look at each page on the site. Prioritize those pages, and then plan your SEO around each page’s priority. Taking a single page into consideration helps to eliminate the “everything has to happen right now†issue and makes it possible for you to create an SEO plan that will maximize your web site’s potential in the minimum amount of time.
Most internet business owners know the basics when it comes to getting ranked well in search engines. Put the keyword in the title. Put the keyword in your headline, the text, etc…
Some get even more “slick” and they insert the keyword many times in the text. Then others get even more technical and begin an active linking strategy. By the way, an active linking strategy can be one of the best ways to get your search engine rankings high – but that’s not what we’re talking about today.
Today I want to talk about a little secret that MOST sites don’t use – even some of the most active websites that PAY for their search engine optimization. The best part is that you can use this trick in just minutes – you could do it 5 minutes after reading this!
Finally, after the hard-core efforts that are directly related to generating traffic to your website, you next step is to develop a strategy that creates follow-on, long-term traffic. Several methods exist for this Tier III strategy:
- Taking the large list of ancillary keywords that relate directly or indirectly to your website, begin purchasing keyword related domain names that will be used to create traffic driving websites that point to your money site.
- Setup satellite pages using the keyword domain names with the idea of capturing traffic geared toward those specific keywords, developing niche market traffic. As you develop niche markets for those new customers, you are going to be able to capitalize on those customers for the other products and/or services that your company offers when these sites link back to your money site as a result of informing and attracting these new customers through the niche sites.
Site Maps can be a great tool for making search engines crawl through your web site in a much more effective manner, thereby helping you get more pages indexed, and ultimately getting you more visitors. Most people know what site maps are, as they can be seen on many of the major websites, although for those who don¡¦t, ¡§a site map is a page which contains a list of all the links within a website, under different categories and headings, just like a table of contents of a book¡¨. Now when a search engine hits the site map page, it gets to see all the links within that website and this enables it to crawl through those pages. It¡¦s just like guiding search engines with the help of a map, in this large universe of internet.
Before you can understand the reasons for using SEO, it might be good to have a definition of what SEO — search engine optimization — is. It’s probably a safe assumption that if you’ve clicked on this link, you have some understanding of SEO, so I’ll keep it simple.
SEO is the science of customizing elements of your web site to achieve the best possible search engine ranking. That’s really all there is to search engine optimization. But as simple as it sounds, don’t let it fool you. Both internal and external elements of the site affect the way it’s ranked in any given search engine, so all of these elements should be taken into consideration. Good SEO can be very difficult to achieve, and great SEO seems pretty well impossible at times.
Here’s a quick and easy search engine optimization (SEO) technique that anyone can use to generate free, high Google page rank links to their site.
SEO in a nutshell: get quality links to your site; the higher the page rank, the better.
The problem is that if you submit your site to a high page rank directory or search engine, it can take months for your site to appear. Moreover, many high PR directories and search engines charge big bucks for the privilege of getting listed with them. For example, the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) directory takes several months or more to list a site. And Yahoo charges $299 per year for a commercial site to be listed in their directory.
