Free Way To Get Website Traffic

It is the age old problem. How do I get more visitors to my website without having to spend a fortune. The answer is simple. You need to optimize your website for the search engines (also known as SEO). 

The thing that is so great about SEO is that once your website is showing at the top of Google, you get website traffic that is 100% free. You don’t ever have to pay 1 cent for any of the visitors that come to your site. Where else in the business world can you get a deal like that?

That’s not even the best part. The website traffic that you get is not just some random world wide web surfer that happened upon your site. The visitors that come to your website are unique in that they are searching for the exact product or service that you offer.

You sell blue widgets, they are searching for blue widgets and found your site. Now they are much more likely to buy a blue widget from you.

So to recap, if you optimize your website for Google and the other search engines, and get your site ranking at the top of Google for your key phrases, you will get free website traffic, and that’s not all, your website visitors will be looking for the product you sell and thus will be highly targeted and much more likely to buy from you.

Is there any better way to make money through your website?

How To Get Website Traffic

So you now know why doing SEO on your website is so awesome. Here are the basics of what you need to do to get your website optimized and get more traffic to your website.

1. Choose your key phrases you want to rank for.

If you sell picnic tables on your website it won’t do you a lot of good to rank for a phrase like “shopping”, or believe it or not you don’t even want to rank for the phrase “tables”. You need to be very specific when choosing your key phrases. Remember, we are trying to get free targeted website visitors which can only happen if we get really specific with the key phrases we rank for.

It is also easier to rank for more specific phrases because you have less competition. So targeting a phrase like “picnic tables” and “picnic tables for sale” would be much better suited for your website. You’ll want to use Googles Keyword Tool to research the best phrases to optimize for. The best strategy is not always to go after the phrases that get searched the most. Go after phrases that will bring you website visitors that will buy.

2. Optimize your website’s pages.

This may sound obvious, but once you have chosen the best key phrases you need to include those phrases on the pages of your website. Do not try to optimize your home page for every phrase you want to rank for. Google looks at each page separately and so each page should have it’s own key phrases to rank for. Try to target 4-6 key phrases per page on your website.

There are 3 main areas on each page where you need to include your key phrases.

1. Title.
   The title of the page is the first thing the search engines look at and what they use to display your website in the search results so you will want to place your most important key phrase 1st in the title. For example, my picnic table title might look something like this:Picnic Tables For Sale – Buy A Picnic Table Metal and Wood
   The title above targets multiple key phrases. My main key phrase is “picnic tables” so I wrote that first. “picnic tables for sale” is another phrase I am targeting so I added the “for sale” after and Google will see those as 2 separate phrases. I then added the singular version “picnic table” and put the phrase “buy” in front of it to capture anyone searching for “buy picnic tables” or “buy picnic table”.  Ideally you want the exact phrase you are trying to rank for be written in order but you wont be able to do that with every phrase.
   You’ll notice that I didn’t use the phrase “picnic tables” more than 1 time in title. There is no need to include it more that once. It won’t help you and just wastes valuable real estate.
2. Description.
   The description is the other part of your page that Google shows in it’s results . The description is actually pretty simple to do once you have your title completed. You basically want to take your title and rewrite it in sentence form. So from the previous example this would be my title:New picnic tables for sale from ABC Company. Get a wood or metal picnic table for your backyard or park today.
   As you will notice I am including all of the phrases again in the description but again only including them once. I still want to keep my main phrases written in the proper order (ie “picnic tables” is kept together).
3. Website Content.
   The third place that you need to include the key phrases is in the website content. The content is the readable text on each page. Every page should have at least 250 words of content so search engines can scan the page and see what the page is about.Pages should have a headline (H1 tag) and maybe even some sub headlines (h2 and h3 tags). Your H1 tag is the main headline of the page. You are essentially telling search engines with your H1 tag “this is the main theme of this page”, so you definitely want to have your main key phrase in the H1 tag. An H1 tag for my picnic site could be something as simple as this:
   Picnic Tables
   I could expand this to take advantage of another phrase and make it say “Picnic Tables For Sale” which would probably be a better tag. Just be sure to include your main phrase.
   The other part of your website content is the readable text. This can come in the form of product descriptions or just content that explains what service you offer etc.
   
   
   This part is where most people make the biggest mistakes on how to include key phrases in the page. It is easy to assume that if you include your main key phrases as many times as you can you will be more likely to rank for the phrases. Unfortunately the opposite is true.
   
   
   You want your website content to be readable by your website traffic, so you don’t want to just throw your key phrases everywhere. Google will consider this spam and you will be less likely to rank high for those phrases.
   A good rule of thumb is to include your key phrase 1-2 times for every 150 words of content. It is important to understand also that Google sees key phrases like this: If you have the phrase “picnic tables” and “picnic tables for sale” on your website 1 time each, Google counts the phrase “picnic tables” 2 times because it is in both phrases. So keep that in mind when you include the phrases.

Want to check how well your website is optimized? Try my free SEO feedback tool.

3. Get Links Pointing To Your Website

If you really want to get website traffic, this step is the most important step by far. To search engines the internet is a popularity contest. They want to see in each industry, which website has the most relevant links pointing to it. And whichever site has the best links they will rank the highest. It is as simple as that.

So how do you get “the best” links. It’s all about the key phrases. You want to get links from other websites preferably in your same industry and the anchor text (clickable text in the link) needs to be your exact key phrases that you are trying to rank for. So if I want to rank for the phrase “picnic tables” I would need to get links from websites in the table or furniture or backyard industries and the anchor text would need to be “picnic tables”.

I wouldn’t stop there though. For each phrase you want to rank for you need to get links that have that anchor text. And the links need to point to the appropriate page that is trying to rank for that specific phrase. You should probably get 4 times as many links for your main phrase than you do for your other phrases but you do need to get a good mix of links.

There are many ways to get links that point to your website. This is definitely the part of SEO that is the most difficult and discourages so many website owners. You can get links from reciprocal link building, directory submissions, article submissions, buying text links, blog reviews etc. The biggest thing to remember here is to get many kinds of links and try to make your link building look as natural as possible.

If every single link I ever got was from a high PR site and always had the anchor text as “picnic tables” it would be very easy for a search engine (Google) to look at it and know that I was trying to manipulate their results by buying links. That is why it is extremely important to get a good mix of both PR, as well as anchor text when you do your link building.

My online SEO software was built to tell you exactly when to get links, what anchor text to use and where to get the links from in order to keep it appearing as natural as possible. So if you have difficulty managing this part of the SEO process we can help you there.

Well there you have it. This is how you get website traffic that is both free and targeted. If you want free website visitors then follow the steps above. It has been working for me for almost 10 years and if you do it right it will work for you too. Good luck getting your website to the top of the search engines.