Category: Web Marketing

Tips And Techniques to Generate Traffic Via Search Engines

In pursuit of search engine traffic

Web Traffic! And lots of it is the dream of every webpreneur. After all, without a steady stream of visitors – or should I say potential customers – to your website, how will you earn your Web fortune?

In the first place, where do most Web business start-ups go when they need a quick traffic fix? The search engines! And rightfully so because, after all, the top ranking position(s) on a major search engine is one of the most effective ways of increasing traffic to your website(s) without spending your hard-earned advertising dollars.

Statistics have repeatedly shown that anywhere from 20% to 80% of your website’s visitors will find it via a search engine. However, you should also know that statistics show that most web surfers never search beyond the top 30 results they receive, and in many cases they don’t go beyond the first 10. With that in mind, it is clear that a top position should be the goal of any savvy site owner.

Ranking well in the search engines

But top spots are no longer achieved by crossing your fingers and blindly submitting your web site to 900+ search engines and directories using a free submission service. Competition for top spots is getting fierce, so it is important that you learn the “right” techniques if you want to ensure that your website is well ranked. Even more importantly, you should do so while this great advertising medium is still FREE!

As I said before; for high traffic generation to your website, it is very important that your site ranks in top spots in a search engines. You may ask “What are the search engine looking for when they rank my web site?” Well, although each search engine uses different set of algorithms to rank web sites, generally speaking, there are still basic similarities and requirements.

In the following paragraphs we discuss a few of the main factors considered by search engines over the last decade or so.

The link popularity method of ranking

Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and the web pages search promotion of Yahoo! use a ranking system that involves measuring and ranking the number of links that are directed towards a particular web site. This is an extremely powerful traffic generation tool because:

Reason One – Building a well thought-out linking strategy is a powerful way to attract large volumes of high targeted traffic. By putting your web site on every major web “intersection” where your target market meets, you will ensure that your web site receives a steady flow of qualified potential customers.

Reason Two – Links are equivalent to recommendations! They established credibility even before the visitor reaches your web site, dramatically increasing the likelihood that they will buy.

Think about it… David arrives at his favorite web site and notices that they have posted a link to your web site. He knows and trusts his favorite web site and therefore assumes that, because they have a linked to you, your business must be credible too. He clicks through the link to your web site and is immediately open to offers you present him with. Why? Because your credibility was established before he even arrived at your homepage.

Reason Three – Since many a search engines now factor link popularity into their ranking decisions, your linking strategies are that much more important! If you want to be ranked as high as possible in search engines, you now need a factor in your link popularity – and, as you already know, earning a top spot in the major search engines is key to increasing your web site traffic.

Obviously, developing a linking strategy that generates a high volume of targeted traffic to your web site is not an overnight process. It will take you anywhere from two weeks to six months to secure quality links you need. However, I promise you that it is worth the effort! Once you have done the initial footwork, the links that are established will remain on these web sites for years to come. Your perseverance will pay big dividends in the form of a continuous flow of targeted traffic generation.

Domain name and keyword density factors

A domain name plays a vital role in traffic generation to any web site. Domain names rich in keywords will rank higher in search engines because a search engines love URL’s that are saturated with keywords. Brainstorm keywords and key phrases for your web site and then use them to create a catchy URL, or load the domain name with your best keywords to get ranked higher in the search engines.

Keywords definitely refers to the number of times your keyword appears throughout your site. Your keyword density is a factor that is heavily weighted by a search engines, so it’s very important to make strategic use of your keywords.

So, these are some of the important facts, tips and tactics through which you can drive high traffic to your web site. I should also mention that you should not expect to enter a couple of your top keywords into the search engines and instantly start making money through your web site – that is a one-in-a-million possibility. But yes, you can really get high traffic via search engines without crossing the line into “keyword stuffing” and with a little time and very little money, if any at all.

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.