How to Get Free Traffic to Your Website Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
How to get free traffic to your website using SEO
There are many ways to get free traffic to your website but I am going to focus on search engine optimization.
SEO is the most common but also one of the most competitive and therefore difficult to master technique to get free traffic to a website. SEO is the art of building your site so it ranks high on the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Here are the keys to SEO:
1 Write great content
Writing great content and plenty of it is key to the search engines ranking your site well. Every site should have at least 15 pages each with over 800 words.
2 Keywords
Choose keywords that you want to rank high for these keywords should be relevant to your content. Scatter these keywords throughout the content and especially in the h1, h2 and h3 headings.
3 Use video
Search engines especially Google who own YouTube love video. You should use at least one video on each page of your site. If you can create your own video that is best because it will grow your image online but other people’s video from YouTube who give you the HTML on the video’s page will do if you can’t make your own video.
4 Optimize your images
I am sure you have images on your website then it is important to name the images using the keywords you want to rank high for.
5 Internal links
Internal links are links to different pages in a website. They tell the search engine what the different pages are about as well as helping visitors to navigate around your site. When you are creating internal links you need to use keywords in them, never create internal links that say click here or read on if you linking to a page titled SEO advanced then use that title or the keywords in that page like search engine optimization. To prove my point search for click here on Google, you will see Adobe come up number 1. That’s because so many people link to Adobe with click here.
6 Incoming links
Search engine optimization is now a popularity contest because Google have changed their algorithm (the way they search and rank web pages). They changed this because people were abusing their search engine by packing their websites with keywords or doing link swaps (linking to another person’s website and them linking back). Although these are perfectly legal they weren’t bringing up the best results for searchers.
So now the most important part of SEO is inbound links from other related and well ranked websites. So how do you get these links when it seems they are out of your control. One way is to write articles about topics in your site and publish them to relevant websites or article publishing sites. Make sure to link back to your website in these articles these links should also contain keywords. Another way is to join some social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc and link back to your site, you can also ask your friends on these sites to link to you. Of course the most effective way to gain links is to write great content people will want to recommend but make sure to get these people to link to using keywords. This is key in helping the search engines rank you higher. For example if you search click here in Google, Adobe will come up number one this is because so many people link to Adobe with click here. The best way to get people to link to you using keywords is to ask them in your content or to provide links for them although this will require some coding skills.
7 Create and submit a site map
You need an xml sitemap for search engines to crawl your site and therefore index it. You can create an xml sitemap for free with many different xml sitemap creators.
8 Name your pages right
Why would you want to create a page on your website and not name it right. What you often see on the 10th page of Google is a site that has it’s pages named as 12544745 but when you go to the 1st page you find sites that pages are named with the keywords you have searched for on Google.
9 Meta tags
Meta tags are found in the HTML of all well ranked pages. The tags are only visible to the search engines. Their purpose is to tell the search engines are the search engines what the page is about that is the description tag. The other tag is the keyword tag which tells the search engine what keywords you want to rank high for. In the description tag you need to write a short sentence about the page, your sentence should contain keywords and be a flowing sentence but it is best to avoid stop words like a or the. The keyword tag contains all the keywords for the page comma separated, the keywords can also be keyword phrases with two or three words in each.
Please note that SEO is not an instant fix and requires work and time before it pays off. But if you follow these 9 techniques and give it some time you will see a massive pay off.
mark collier