Top Search Engine Traffic Secrets

We’d all love to increase search engine traffic… especially when you’re talking about the “free” kind – the kind that’s the result of ranking well in organic search engine results, but how many actually know all the necessary steps to get it? And I’m not talking about maybe here, I mean you will definitely get more traffic for free if you follow these steps.

All search engine rankings start with proper keyword selection. We call it a “keyword” now, but what we’re really talking about is the entire phrase or sentence that people type into search engines like Google when they search for something. We call that entire set of words, or search engine query, the “keyword.”

Each keyword you choose for your web page or article must meet the following three criteria:

1. People are actually typing the keyword into search engines, and enough to make it worth targeting. How much is “enough” is up to you and your particular niche and goals, but generally speaking, we like to see a minimum of 20 searches per day for the keyword, as reported by a trusted tool like the Free Keyword Tool. from Google or Wordtracker.

2. Not so many web pages are already optimized for that keyword that your chances of getting a first page ranking are slim to none. What we’re generally looking for here is less than 30,000 or more “optimized” web pages, that is, the number of results returned by Google when it searches for the keyword in quotes (that’s what it tells the search engine to only return pages for). that exact word). phrasing).

Now there is another factor for this criteria… and that is to look at the “quality” of the sites on the first page of Google for that keyword. If they’re all hugely authoritative sites, sites like CNN, Wikipedia, and About.com, then again, you’re not likely to rank on the first page anytime soon or without some extraordinary effort.

3. People using this keyword are likely to be serious about what you have to offer. If you are selling a product or service (either your own or as an affiliate), this is called “commercial intent.” Microsoft now has a free tool to help determine the likelihood that a keyword has good business intent or purchase intent. Just google “commercial intent tool” and you’ll see it on msn.com.

Once you know the keyword, or set of keywords, that makes sense to target, you need to consider both facets of getting great search engine rankings. These are on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page means including your exact keyword phrase in all the appropriate places on your web page, including the title tag, description, header tags, and of course, in the content itself.

Today, getting great rankings often requires even more than this, especially with Google’s sophisticated ranking algorithms. You would do well to also consider including terms that are semantically related to your chosen keyword. How do you know what these are?

What a search engine does is see what other terms are prevalent on authority sites that focus on this particular keyword. A free tool that comes close to doing this is “kwbrowse” – just google it to locate it.

Off-page simply means getting links pointing to your web page from other web pages, with variations of the keyword in the link anchor text.