How does free search engine traffic work?

You’ve experienced this process a lot of times. You go to Google. Enter in a word or phrase you want to research. And then you visit one or more of the sites that show up. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. What need to figure out is how to get you free traffic.

Most people only click results from the first couple pages. In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic. And what’s more, the first 3 get over 70% of the clicks.

So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. To do that, you need to be “ranked” in Google’s Top 10 results. Which brings up..

What is SEO?

SEO means that your website is clearly about something specific, Google knows that that is and thinks others will agree and find your site useful. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. There are several factors that we do know.

Getting indexed

First, before you can get ranked highly, Google has to know you exist. This is known as being “indexed.” When your website gets indexed, Google stores information about it in their massive database.

Google needs to actually find your site in order to index it. Getting a link from another site will accomplish this easily. Because Google already knows about these sites, it will follow the new links to you.

A couple of great places to do this are in your Twitter or Facebook profiles. These sites are very popular so Google indexes them multiple times a day. And follows new links it finds immediately.

Gaining ranking

Once you have been indexed, you will start working on increasing your rank. Just getting indexed does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.

The 3 factors in getting ranked:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

SEO content

This is the SEO you do on your site itself. You need to make sure your content matches the search terms you’re going after. The topic of this article is clearly SEO. One reason Google knows this is because the words search engine optimization appear inside it. But also because other related words like traffic generation show up in it, as well.

In addition to the content on the page, other things to keep in mind are the title tags on the page, and the domain name itself. Each of these plays a roles in Google determination about your site.

Link juice

The next thing to consider is your links. The links to your site, as well as the sites you link to are important. With inbound links, you want to have more coming in than going out. And the more inbound links the better.

One great way to get lots of inbound links is through web 2.0 sites. With this strategy what you do is write an article about the topic you’re targeting. You have to also write several different versions of your articles. And post unique versions to lots of websites that accept articles. The more sites you can do this for, the more links you’ll get back.

Make your site active

The last thing we know for sure is that Google likes to see active sites. You can’t just put up a page and leave it alone and expect it to rank well. Google expects you to be updating your site regularly. RSS feeds are an easy way to keep your content changing.

Another great way to keep your page content fresh is to enable comments on it and allow others to discuss your page topic. To get comments from others, you need to get others to visit your site. One simple method for doing this is to use forums.

What you need to do is sign up with several forums in your niche. Then become active in the forum. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This will get your more inbound links. And it will also get real visitors to your site.

Conclusion

It’s important that you do everything listed here. But let’s face it, writing multiple versions of the same article. Setting up tons of profiles on forums. And posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time. And you’re already too busy, so you mostly likely will never do any of it.

Fortunately, you can get rank builder software to do all the grunt work for you. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you can. And then you’re sure to get it done. And not doing it means you will never get free traffic from Google.