Increase Your Website Traffic Free!

So you have your website up, but where is the traffic?

There is common misconception, fed by the many 'turn key' opportunities being pushed online, that if you build a nice webpage with some cool stuff on it, people will just magically find you and you will start making money.

Many 'Turn Key' Web Sites are mass produced cookie cutter sites or sometimes refered to as feeder sites. While it is possible to make money with some of these that are available, very few just start getting traffic all by themselves when you launch. Those that get traffic have spent some extra time (and likely money) tweeking their site to 'attract' traffic by targeting the keywords they use. I personally won't recommend most of feeder sites.

A common misconception for many business people that don't have internet marketing experience is that they can build a website for their brick and mortor business and traffic will just find them. This just simply isn't the case. I have done extensive research and study and know that not only does the website matter, so too does the content and it is far from easy. There are many many companies that don't have a web presence. For the self educated Intranet Entrepreneur, this is actually a HUGE opportunity that can be exploited in ANY town throughout the world.

This sort of arrangement is referred to as a Joint Venture. Offer local businesses the service of driving traffic to thier site through SEO tactics. It benefits you, because they will pay for your service and tell their business friends about the nice person that helped them get a pile more customers, which of course will bring you more business and $$$.

Even a low quality web page can be optimized to get more traffic. It doesn't have to be flashy (as a matter of fact, I recommend you avoid flashy graphics), but it MUST have something useful/interesting or your visitors will simply click away. So before anything else, work to develop a presentable and useful site. To get idea, Search for other sites offering similar product/service and study their layout, design, content. Look through forums that discuss your topic and see what folks are talkin' about and what they are looking for. Answer their questions on your site, stick with similar content, but find a way to be unique. Your site should be just as presentable and functional as the best site you are competing with (or better). I know this is a daunting step for many would be internet marketers and it is a reason that many fail. If this is particularly challenging for you consider farming the site design and development. www.elance.com is about the biggest company for this service. You can post webdesign projects, copywritting, software creation, graphic design...you name it, someone is likely ready and willing to try it out. elance works on a bidding system. Post a job and people will bid and usually share examples of past work. Pick the bid you like and your off. I suggest being careful to review the quality of service as well as cost. It is often worth it to spend a bit more for someone with experience and reputation. I can not stress enough, this is absolutely essential to succeeding with an internet business.

My Website Looks Great! Now how do I get the Traffic?

When a internet user is looking for something, they are typing in random 'keywords'. Keywords are simply defined as the common search words users type to find a particular topic. For example, if you typed website into Google you would get a massive list of sites, if you typed "Increase Web Traffic Free ", you get a smaller list with most of the sites at the top of your search being most relevant to your search words, "increase web traffic free ". The words you type to search are called keywords. As a website owner, your job is to try and determine what 'keywords' your visitors might enter to find the information/service/product your website is offering. A keyword Phrase is a series of words together, "increase web traffic free" is a keyword phrase. You will be much more successful driving traffic to your site with a keyword phrase that just one keyword (unless there is no competition for your keyword). This is especially true in a 'Hot' market, such as gaming. The keyword gaming, while searched a lot, will get you buried under the bigger high budget, high ranked sites. A stratregic keyword phrase, while searched less, will be more likely to get your site found by the search engines on showing on the first page. These keywords are placed stratigecly through out your web page. This is basically the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

If you don't have a website and aren't a web design techie then you will likely have challenges with launching a website without expense. Many companies spend thousands of dollars on web design. There are a few of us out there that have figured out a few 'tricks'. Many hosting companies offer webdesign tools. X Site Pro is a Killer program. Nuvu is free HTML editor that looks and functions very simularily to Microsoft Word. There are many options, just pick your path and stick to it.SEO is actually much easier than it seems, it just takes a bit o' learning and practice.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be defined as a set of consistant predetermined keywords stratigically placed within a webpage to assist the search engines index and find the webpage. This thereby increases the 'ranking' of the webpage in the search results.

So how do I SEO my website? And How do I Find Good Keywords?

Keyword research is a HUGE and growing industry. You can conduct your research free online. I have included some links to some good free services. The Google Keyword Tool is my favorite free online keyword tool. I also like to check WordTracker.com as well.

There are many paid services and software to beef up and speed up the job. The biggest advantage to a paid service or download software is the ability to pull data from multiple sources quickly, conduct analysis and manipulation of the keywords produced, SEO scan of the competition. I use SEO Book and the Free Google Keyword Tool. I have a link below where you can download Free SEO Book Software. Even the limited version still offers a bit more data than most free tools. But the free tools are still good and one can conduct very effective research without ever purchasing a beefed up program. There is a VERY good guide that you can download free from SEO Book that I suggest you grab if your into gettin' on top of SEO.

The Software ads some nice perks, when you want more data, or SEO data. A 'beefed up' keyword tool, such as SEO Book, includes more specific details of number of searchs, number of sites that contain that term, number of Paid Advertising Campaign (over multiple networks) and two particularly useful numbers,KEI and R/S.

What is KEI and R/S and Why are they important?

R/S is defined as the ratio of number of searchs to number of sites containing the search term, or results over searchs. For example (I will keep this example simple for illustrative purposes), lets suppose we enter a search term into Keyword Analyzer. It returns 10,000 websites containing that term, and 1000 searchs are logged with the search engine. The R/S value would then be calculated as follow 10,000/1000=10. So 10 is the R/S value. As you can see, the lower the R/S the better.

KEI is the abriviation for Keyword Effectiveness Index which is defined as a measure of how effective a keyword is for your web site. The higher the KEI the better that keyword term should perform (unless there is an unusually high number of competing websites).

Remember, it is best to have a high KEI and a low R/S.