WANT FREE WEB TRAFFIC...?
One of the Internet Marketing Holy Grails is free online traffic. The odd thing about free traffic is that there is no actual "secret" to it: it's often just a matter of concentrating on a few essential operations and developing a strategy or system to make the work as simple as possible.
The good news is that anyone who puts in the effort can send a flood of visitors to their chosen website or blog. The tactics I'll describe in this report don't necessitate a degree in Astrophysics; all you need is a willingness to put in the effort and a commitment to follow through.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Before we begin, you may have heard the term "search engine optimization" but not completely comprehended what it entails. The technique by which a web page owner adjusts the structure and content of a specific web page to make it appear highly relevant to a given search query is known as Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). The goal is to appear at the top of a Search Engine Results Page (or at least on the first page) (also known as SERPs).
The crucial word to remember here is "web page," not "web site." While Google considers a few sites to be "Authority Sites" and puts many pages at the top of a page of search results, the vast majority of searches return lists of individual pages.
This is critical because it allows you to create a new page for each search keyword you want to target (see below). Typically, a potential web consumer will type a search word into a search engine and then read the results for the information they require.
They might go to page 2 or 3 of the search engine results if they don't find what they're looking for, but it's unlikely they'll go any further. It's considerably more likely that they'll try to narrow down their search by using a modified or, in some circumstances, entirely different search word.
Consider the last time you needed to find something but didn't know what search keyword to use... What steps did you take to find the information you needed?
Market Research..
The fairly unglamorous, and some would say monotonous, process of Market Research is the first step in an efficient SEO campaign. The concept is straightforward. You must understand what words or phrases your target audience types into the search engine query box in order to take steps to rank effectively for that phrase or keyword.
With billions of web pages available (and growing every day), the average searcher must rely largely on Search Engines to help them locate what they're looking for.
While Google gets the largest volume of search requests it is a mistake to ignore the other search engines. At the end of 2013 YouTube.com ranked as the second largest (and most popular) search engine on the Internet (#1 was of course YouTube’s parent company Google.com).
Another interesting fact to note is that while Google is the most popular for general searches, numerous studies have shown that traffic from Bing.com converts to buyers very well. So while Google gets more searches it seems that Bing is used by more home shoppers to find things to buy. As this report is all about "free web traffic" I will describe how you can do effective market research using only the free resources available from the search engines. On a side note, an alternative option would be to invest in one of the many excellent keyword search tools such as Market Samurai (which does so much more than just keyword research) and more specialized tools like Keyword Elite. But, back to the free methods. As you are going to be relying on the search engines to bring the web visitors to your site it makes sense to start your keyword search using their own tools.
A quick Google search for "Google External Keyword Tool" will bring you, unsurprisingly, to Google's own keyword tool. Here you enter your core keywords and the Google Keyword tool will return a list of related keywords and list the number of times each keyword or keyword phrase is used as a search term per month. For example, let's say you are looking to market bird cages. Using the Google Keyword Tool you find the following results (the numbers are searches per month):
One word of warning, when completing your keyword search using the Google tool: please ensure that you have selected either a “phrase match” or “exact match” as this will give you a much more reliable estimation of the number of searches completed. The smart way of working is to pick the phrases that are more targeted. I would suggest your goals here are firstly to see how well your competitors rank in the search results and secondly to use your competitors to help you in your quest for great search engine results (and subsequently some more free traffic).
The job of a search engine is to match a web visitor with a query (the keyword phrase) with a relevant web page that has an answer to the query. These are your potential competitors and you are looking for pages that you can beat in the search engine results remember. Getting a helping hand from the competition is a practice I think most people over look. So, sticking with Bird Cages for a bit longer, enter the keyword phrase you are interested in optimizing your site for and then select the #1 result from the search engine.
Then, using the View Source command from your browser have a look at the underlying
web code.
These funny bits of code are called Tags and they tell your web browser (and things like search engines) all about the web page.
The “Title” tag is one of the most important bits of code on the web page. If your competitor’s web page does not have the keyword phrase in question in this tag it’s good news - you have a chance of leapfrogging them in the search results.
The “Meta” tags are less important to the search engines but can be very useful for you. Assuming that your competition has already completed their market research I would expect them to have other profitable keywords and phrases listed in their Meta tags. So a quick read of these code sections can give you additional phrases to add to your keyword list.
Link Building...
You can think of links to your site as being votes by other websites for your site’s relevancy and popularity. In simple terms, a link for another popular and/or relevant page to your page will count for more than a link from an unpopular or irrelevant page. So your goal is to get as many backlinks (a link that points back to your own site) as possible and ideally have those links come from an authority site. Bookmarking Link bait articles like the ones mentioned on sites like Digg and Delicious or advocating them with links via Twitter or Facebook are a great way to kick start a viral marketing campaign.
Equally, these same outlets are a great way to conduct lightning market research into popular headlines and report types. Spending 20 minutes researching the most popular headlines on Digg in your particular niche is a great way to come up with ideas for your own link bait short reports.
The second way to gather backlinks is to write relevant content and submit this content to popular web 2.0 sites. You get your article and a very valuable backlink on the right type of site meanwhile the site owner gets free content written for them. Whichever strategy you choose (and ideally you will do a mix of both) the more links you can get the better and the higher the quality of the link the bigger it’s impact on your Free Traffic Campaign.
Free Web Traffic...
As with most things in business, it is a simple case of doing the right thing (market research, competitor analysis, linkbuilding: the smart work bit) in the right way and then repeating the process (the hard work bit) until you get the desired outcome.