Drive Traffic To Your Website With Great Keywords Selection

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SERPs ranking

Getting a website to appear in the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) is a common goal for most webmasters, yet few possess the skills to actually achieve it. There are many steps to take in order to be found for terms related to your site, and taking your time to research the best possible phrases for your site is an important step on the ladder.

Many webmasters make the mistake of assuming that a ranking for one generic term related to their site will turn their website into a profitable success. Although that one generic term may provide a good stream of traffic and brand awareness, this doesn’t mean the traffic will convert into sales or leads, and the costs of targeting that term will tower over your return on investment. It is best for the webmaster to target multiple terms that not only drive traffic, but also lead to that all important conversion.

First of all you need to consider who your target audience is and the purpose of your site. Do you sell products online? Do you offer services? Is it more content focused? There are all sorts of potential visitors which will have varying ways of finding your site, so understanding your audience, and the reasons they will visit, will help focus your efforts.

Keyword selection

With this in mind, you can now consider those generic terms that you think people will use to try and find your site. It shouldn’t just be one term – a trap that many webmasters fall into is assuming that one term will provide enough traffic to sustain business and are surprised that business doesn’t increase if they do achieve that ranking.

All of the possible phrases and themes of your site must be taken into consideration, even if you have to use a thesaurus to find related terms, or checking competitor websites for ideas. It can be surprising just what terms your potential visitors will be using!

Once you have put together a list of short generic terms, you can start using tools to gauge how popular and competitive those terms are, and also refine those generic terms to be more targeted to your site’s purpose. The first step is to find out the popularity of terms, which can be done using various keyword suggestion tools.

Keyword tools

Keyword suggestion tools tell you which terms were typed into searches, and how many searches were conducted on those terms. Typing a phrase in will return a selection of alternative phrases that contain your generic term, alternative suggestions with a similar theme as well as an estimate of how much traffic the phrase provides per month.

These tools can be flawed as they query different search engines and the traffic estimations can be inaccurate, but they are still good for getting a ball park estimation of the amount of searches conducted, and for suggesting multiple terms you may never have thought of targeting.

The Overture Keyword Tool, located at inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/, is free to use and gives you a list of suggested terms as well as the amount of searches conducted on the Yahoo! Search Marketing network during the last month (Yahoo! Bought Overture and rebranded it Yahoo! Search Marketing).

A similar tool is located at www.wordtracker.com. Wordtracker queries the meta search engine Dogpile so may not be representative of what is being searched on the web as a whole, but is still good for suggesting alternative phrases and related phrases. Wordtracker has a subscription service, with which you can order between one day and one year’s access.

Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery at www.keyworddiscovery.com is a relative newcomer to the keyword suggestion market. KeywordDiscovery can query multiple search engines across the world and provides similar results to Overture and Wordtracker.com as well as other services, but with subscriptions starting at $32.50 per month this premium option is geared more towards search marketing professionals.

Keyword popularity, competitiveness

The next step in picking the best terms is checking how competitive they are. Ideally you want to find terms that have high volume traffic but few websites competing to rank for those terms, and you can use various tricks to judge this. Any page that is optimized for a term will at least have that term in the title tag and in anchor text of links pointing to the site.

By going to Google and using the queries intitle:”phrase here” and inanchor:”phrase here”, you can figure out how many other pages have optimized for your chosen phrase. The lower the number for these searches, the less competitive the term is. For more information about what these Google advanced search operators do, go to www.google.com/help/operators.html.

Using these tools should have now provided you with a list of terms that are much more targeted than your original generic phrases. These can include breaking your term down by geographical location, or a specific product. You will be able to optimize your site for multiple phrases – remember that search engines index web pages and not just websites. That means all of the pages in your site can be found in search engines, which in turn means all of those pages can be optimised for different terms!

Longtail keywords

You may also want to consider the “long tail” of search phrases. These are obscure multi word phrases that are only searched a couple of times, but are so specific they can end up being the most targeted terms and carry with them higher conversion rates. The best way to target the long tail is to have a content rich site – the more content you have the more likely you are to be picked up for obscure terms that can be found in your copy.

So you should now finally have a list of the best possible targeted phrases for your website! As you can see, the process of choosing your keywords isn’t something that should be taken lightly, and there is a lot of work to do if you want to maximize the ability of your site to attract natural search traffic. With your final list you will now be ready to optimize your pages to be found for those terms, but that is for another time.

Highly Effective Web Traffic Techniques

We all know that traffic is most essential for a successful Internet business. There are several ways to jumpstart your traffic flows which have been proven reliable, though most of them would cost some money. In this article I’d like to tell you about my favorite web promotion tactics, which wouldn’t cost you a single cent. Moreover, some of them will save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The first tactic alone can generate the equivalent of over $2,000 of free targeted traffic for you.

Per-per-click ads

Free pay-per-click (PPC) advertising works, especially Adwords by Google, Yahoo’s Overture and a number of other PPC search engines provide great sources of targeted Web traffic. They are very popular among web marketers. However, as the PPC search engine managers need to expand their customer base they obviously must convince people like you that pay-per-click advertising really works.

Here is the good news. There are dozens of PPC search engines who will give you up to $100 in free credits to prove that pay-per-click advertising will work for you. To claim your credits all you need to do is visit the various engines and web directories and sign-up. There are no catches and it won’t cost you anything except your time.

It couldn’t be simpler to obtain such free PPC advertising. The table at this page: http://www.affiliated-business.com/promotion/Pay-Per-Click5.html lists over 60 Pay Per Click Search Engines offering in excess of $2,000 of free web promotion credits. One after another select the PPC search engines from the list, click on the links to open the corresponding sign-up pages and sign up for your free advertising accounts.

Popular keywords

Using profitable (the more popular a keyword or key phrase is, the more profitable it is, generally) keywords or keyword niches for your site’s content. Generally speaking, Internet users utilize search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword rankings to give away relevant search results. If you’d like your site to appear at the top lines of search engine results, you must use proper keywords and keyword phrases.

Try to employ the most profitable (or highest in-demand) keywords in your site’s content. You can write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you. If you’re writing content by yourself you have to make it more entertaining as well as informative.

In doing so, you can get high rankings in search engine results and strong incoming traffic without any costs.

Link exchanges & article writing

Exchange links with partner sites is another great idea that works well especially when both sites feature the same niche, precisely because such link trading or exchanging could result in both of websites benefiting. When one site features another site’s link, they will provide one another with the traffic they both generate.

The efforts are doubly beneficial because it seems like both sides are working to generate doubly enhanced traffic so, in essence, he more links exchanged with more sites the more traffic those sites could expect to gain.

And again, you don’t have to spend a red cent. All you have to do is to communicate to another webmaster and come to an agreement with him/her covering the terms and respective responsibilities of the mutually beneficial transaction.

Write articles and publish them across the Internet is an excellent traffic-generating strategy, especially in view of the fact that there are many sites that offer free article submission and posting of your articles. You’d do better to submit articles to sites containing the same subject that your site deals with. If you sell computers write press releases and articles about computers and computer parts. Try to provide helpful tips guides and good advice. Writing articles that contain good service and knowledge would bring the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

When people find in your article is something of interest, you have good chances of following the track by finding out where the article originated. It’s best for you to just to attach a brief description of your site or service at the end of the article and to include a link.

Online communities

Here is a strategy that eludes many website owners. When you as a website owner join forums, blogs and other online communities you can really take advantage of these web communities, because the great thing about them is that you can target a certain group that fits the specific demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss lots of things about the products and/or services merchants you represent or offer yourself.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. You must capture the market niche you represent and show your expertise and credibility. When you create a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your web business. Your customers will pass on their trust and credibility to many people all over the Internet. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

Newsletters and ezines

When Web marketers have offered newsletters and eZines in their marketing campaigns they have been extremely successful which indicates that if a newcomer were to learn the methods used to employ this strategy s/he can also make use of newsletters to drive traffic to his/her website. And the steps are relatively simple. Provide people with a catalog of your products along with interesting useful articles, and if your content really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people will be willing to visit your site. So, if you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you grow your traffic.

The viral marketing edge

There are many advantages a website owner can gain with the use of viral marketing. It is a promotional method that allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs, and all it takes is to bring a great idea, a good addicting game, or funny story and let the Web do the rest. Many ideas are still out there, and if you can create a gossip or a buzz, you will likely benefit from the many web projects that are advertised by using scandals and rumors to make them more popular.

Also you can provide your web site visitors with content they wouldn’t read anywhere else. People will stay longer at your web site to read the original content. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the website content and they will pass it on to many people.

Each of the methods mentioned above can drive streams of free traffic to your website. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the techniques discussed here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.