Free Search Engine Traffic

This article is dedicated to something that has as many answers as there are questions, search engine ranking and driving free search engine traffic to your site. I answer this question using a few simple techniques that I use to market my sites.

It should be fairly obvious to you why free search engine traffic is so important, particularly if you are running a website for the purpose of making money. Free traffic means that for every sale you make, you have much higher profits, or potentially infinite profits if you are selling affiliate products or you are monitizing your traffic through advertising programs such as adsense or yahoo ads.

When generating free traffic, if you only make $1 per 10,000 visitors, that’s ok, because those are 10,000 free visitors, and the beauty of 10,000 free visitors is that because you will have grown to these numbers organically, you can ramp up that traffic by repeating the processes you went through to get to this level in the first place.

Another beauty of having 10,000 free visitors is that you can tweak your site to see what results you receive without worrying whether your revenues will go down, because at the end of the day, your traffic is free.

When I talk about 10,000 visitors, the time frame you aim for is up to you. When I create a new site, I aim at some basic mile stones. For example, I aim to initially gain enough ligitimate and ethical incoming links to get my site crawled by the big search engines, particularly google. Once this has been achived, I aim to push my page rank up using some simple techniques and we will look at these now.

Optimize Your Site

You need to ask yourself two very important questions:

What market are you aiming at?

Is your site optimized at this market?

The market you decide to aim at is your choice and really is something you need consider based on your own personal research.

As far as your optimization is concerned, this is something I can offer my advice on. Firstly what do we mean by optimization? Well, optimization is a fairly simple subject. When you look at a website selling holidays, look at the contents of the site, what you will see is content (or writing and text) about holidays, travel, travel destination and methods of transport that their holidays use. What you won’t see is content about say buying cars. The content and text on your site needs to be relevant to the market you are aiming to penetrate.

If your website is loaded with graphic, remember that search engines bots that rank your site cannot see these graphics and have absolutely no idea what the graphic is, so in the tag that tells the web browser to display the graphic, you need to include in that tag an alt (alternate) tag so that firstly if the graphic fails to load visitors can see what the graphic is supposed to be, and secondly it enables the search engines to see what the graphic is related to. So it is important you include in this alt tag an important keyword for your site. For example, alt (equals symbol) relavant keywords description of image

So now you have learnt the importance of including the relevant keywords you are marketing towards in the text and image tags on your website. What we will look at now is your linking strategy.

Linking Strategy

Now that your website is optimized for the keywords you are targeting at your next goal is now the most important marketing skill you will add to your portfolio. Generating incoming links.

Incoming links are like a little spotlight shining on a part of your website making it visible to the outside world, and if you are able to generate enough RELEVANT incoming links pointing to the various pages of your site, you will start to build a good page rank for your chosen keywords. It is important to remember that generating incoming links from link farms and sites that do not rank highly for the keywords you are aiming at is completely counter productive and may infact hurt you to the point where search engines may potentially ban you. You want to build your site using only good incoming links. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first is through forums, the second through blogging, thirdly via e-zine articles and fourthly and most importantly link sharing.

Forum linking strategies Perform a search using the keywords your marketing strategy is aimed at and find the relevant forums focusing on topics you believe are within the scope of your site. Sign up to these forums and in your profile place your URL. That is one link the search engines will see. Also while in the profile page, in the signature box, add a text link with your URL as the destination. Now join in the forums and make sure you add relevant comments and genuinly join in with the forum. This is important otherwise you will be flagged up for spamming. Initially you should not include your signature until you have becoming stablished in the forums and once you have, then you can start placing your signature on your posts. Very effective strategy.

Blogging By blogging on your site about the products or area you are marketing, you will generate relevant comment for search engines to order your site by. Also you will create information for visitors to your site to consume meaning they are more likely to stay on your site. You can also list your blog with blog registers, creating even more incoming links.

E-zine Article Writing E-zine article writing is similar to blogging. A good technique is to turn your blog entries into e-zine articles and post them on e-zine sites with your link at the bottom. This enables people to use your articles on their website and they are obliged to place your link at the bottom. This not only creates incoming links from the e-zine directories, but also from people who use your articles on their websites.

Link Sharing Link sharing is a simple process. Once you have built a blog with good content, look for similar blogs and contact the webmaster and ask if they would be willing to share your blog. They can either place a link to your blog on their site and your return the favour, or they can post blog entries on your blog with a link back to their blog at the bottom, and you place an entry on theirs with a link to yours. If you repeat this process several times with relevant blogs and they are marketing their sites aswell, their page link will be increasing, your page link will be increasing and you will all boost each other page rank.

Now implement these strategies and watch your traffic grow. Remember this is not an instant fix, but it will increase your traffic and page rank, and you will see your traffic grow substantially.

http://www.innerdivide.com/traffictrading.php Inner Divide is a free resource dedicated to offering impartial, practical and top quality information to home and small business owners and netpreneurs alike.

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