Optimize Your Site For Free Traffic

You've just created a website and registered a domain name. You have an awesome product and great content. You think man any day now I am going to get a bunch of people checking out my site. But that day doesn't come. Sure you get a few visitors each day and maybe even average 20 or 30 unique visitors. But this is never going to get your business off the ground.

Let's face it there are 2 kinds of traffic on the internet. The paid kind which comes from advertising and pay per click (PPC Google AdWords). And there's the free kind which comes from the search engines. I don't know about you but I would much rather prefer to receive sustainable free traffic then the paid kind.

SEO - What is it?

So how do we get free traffic and what's involved. Free traffic comes from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are others but these are the major ones. People use search engines to find products and services. In fact most successful online business' report the majority of the traffic they receive to their sites comes from the search engines. And unless your site appears on the first few pages of a search chances are you will not be noticed very often.

I don't care if your site provides services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. Is in fact a process of optimizing pages of your website and make them search engine friendly so that they can be positioned in the top of search results for particular keywords.

How Search Engines Function

Search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders" that visit websites from all over the internet and gather information regarding web pages that are searched by the people. This is otherwise known as having your website crawled.

After crawling the WebPages on your site, the gathered content is stored in a huge searchable database of documents which make up the search engine's "index". The search engine arranges this information in various searchable fields, so that when a queried the search engine can scan billions of documents and completes this in fractions of a second.

The results which are displayed are the ones that most accurately portray the information related to the keywords that the user has searched for. A match is determined if the terms or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user. Every search engine has its own algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) and matching criteria to provide the user with the result, so the result may vary for the same keyword in different search engines.

Ranking Results:-
Results are ranked based on a number of different criteria. They start from the top of the list being the most relevant to the bottom which is the least relevant. One of the key most important factors is keyword relevance. And in order to rank highly based on keyword relevance you need to have pages related to a specific keyword phrase.

Steps to SEO
Bellow is the list of general steps to optimize the website in order to get the higher rankings in the search engines.

Keywords Analysis:-

Keywords are words or phrases the potential customer may use to search any business for their needs. For example if you are a taxation service provider in USA, "Tax Refund USA", is called a keyword. The first step in Search Engine Optimization is identifying the important keywords for your business. You can determine this list by analyzing your business & your competitors, in order to determine which words should be targeted. Here is an example of a list of keywords for the taxation service provider in USA,

Tax Return USA
Tax Refund USA
USA TaxRapid
Tax Refund
Online Tax USA

Keyword Analysis also includes looking at how many people search for a given term to determine how popular it is and hence its importance. Based on this keyword analysis optimization of the given web site is done to get you the best possible rank on the search engines.

On page Off Page Optimization:-

There are 2 types of optimization that must be performed. First is On Page. This essentially means things that will be done to the coding of your existing pages. After analyzing the keywords you must optimize the web site based on these keywords. Web site optimization includes:
Meta Tags Optimization, Keyword Enrichment and Interlinking of site pages. First optimize your sites meta tags. Change this to include keywords which you are looking to target. Then carefully add a blending of those keywords within your websites content so search engines can read them. At last the interlinking of your website's pages is established, so the search engines can easily "crawl" your web site to read and rank them based on your keywords.

Link Exchange:-
Now for Off Page Optimization. This is one of the most important and powerful step in the SEO process. Search engines count Link popularity when ranking the site. So the number of incoming links to a site from related sites is very important. These back links can be achieved by exchanging links with other sites. Seek out other high ranking sites that are related to your site and ask for a reciprocal link. This will help you greatly.

Paid Traffic

Pay Per Click Campaigns:-

The search engine results pages contain not only listings of documents found to be relevant to the user's query, but other content, including paid advertisements. "Pay Per Click" - PPC is the secondary source results for search engines. Google, for example, serves up ads from its well-known AdWords Program. In short for PPC, we have to pay for the advertisement we want to display on search engine results. The nice thing about Pay Per Click is that one only needs to pay when someone clicks on his/her advertisement. But to get best result from this Pay Per Click Campaign, the website needs to be combined with good website optimization. Be careful when using this type of traffic generation. I have seen many people spend many thousands of dollars/month for this type of exposure.

So there you have it. Traffic the free kind and the paid kind. And we all agree that the free kind is the best traffic to get. Just imagine how your business would succeed with hundreds of targeted visitors each day who find your site based on a key phrase entered into a major search engine.