You
Are Here: Home
> Resource
Articles > Search
Engine Strategies > Article

|
Untitled Document
Top
Picks for
Friday, 05 Sep 2008
|
Building
Targeted Traffic (Part 1)
by
Priya Shah
There are 2 ways
of getting targeted traffic from search engines or directories:
1) FREE Search Engine
Traffic
2) PAY-PER-CLICK Search Engine Traffic
Free Search
Engine Traffic
Why is Search Engine Marketing so important?
The statistics speak
for themselves:
- 91% of Internet users use search engines to navigate the web.
- 9 out of 10 searches are done from the top 20 search engines.
- 85% of search engine users do not look past the first 40 results.
- 77% of Internet users employ search engines more frequently
than any other online media as the leading vehicle for discovering
websites, surpassing banner ads, web links, e-mail links, etc.
When you do a search, how many pages of results do you go through?
If you're like most people you won't go further than the first
3 pages, unless you didn't find what you were looking for in the
first 3.
To get your site placed in the first 3 pages requires what is
called Optimization, or in plain English, making your site search-engine
friendly.
Although "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO is a very
specialised field and takes a lot of time to excel at, there are
3 essential factors that you need to make your website more search
engine friendly.
1) USEFUL CONTENT: This is what users want and
what search engines would like to offer—sites with good,
useful content about the topic of the search. Even a few pages
of useful content about your product will get you into the search
engine's good books, but it is unlikely to get you in the first
3 pages.
2) RELEVANT KEYWORDS: Describing your site simply
by adding a Page TITLE and DESCRIPTION that contains your main
keywords.
In SEO jargon, these are called 'Metatags' and they must be
placed in the 'Head' of your document, i.e. they are the FIRST
thing the search engines see when they visit your site to index
it.
Guidelines for Metatags:
- TITLE (not more than 60 characters long),
- DESCRIPTION (not more than 150 characters long)
- PAGE COPY (as long as necessary).
Your Title is also the most important because it is displayed
in the search results. A good title would be one that contains
your main keywords AND is inviting or interesting enough to make
a potential customer/lead click on it.
3) LINK POPULARITY: Search engines like Google,
give more emphasis to sites that are popular. So if you have many
sites linking to you by a method called "Reciprocal Linking"—providing
a link back to a site that also links to you—you will get
a higher search engine ranking.
You can see this in practice here on my links pages:
http://www.1whey2health.com/links.htm
http://www.1whey2health.com/bizcentre.htm
Reciprocal links from sites related to your site topic or to
the products you are selling, count more than unrelated links.
In time, these links themselves could become an excellent (and
more permanent) source of traffic than search engines.
You'll find some excellent tools to help you find new link partners
and build your link popularity here.
Here is one of the best resources on link-building: 131
(Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
Design Your Own Website
If you would like to create a completely new site, and have no
website designing experience, you could learn to do it yourself.
You'll find a lot of website creation tools and resources in this
2 pages:
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/ebooks5.htm
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/bizsoftware1.htm
Hire A Professional Designer
Or if you don't have the time, you could consider hiring a professional
to do it for you. You can find a professional designer to suit
your budget at the links below:
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/publishing.htm
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/cmymtc.htm
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/elance.htm
SEO Resources
If you're interested in spending the time and energy required
to optimize your website, you will find a LOT of useful resources
here:
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/ebooks6.htm
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/bizsoftware2.htm
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/setraffic2.htm
But if I were to recommend just ONE tool to do all of the above,
it would be this: Get your FREE DOWNLOAD of Make
Your Content PREsell!—the entire book that SBI! owners
receive! It contains all you need to know to build, step by step,
a tightly-focused, Search Engine-friendly, theme-based site that
will attract targeted visitors.
Tips For Search Engine Promotion
With human-edited directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory
Project (from where Google takes some of its results), having
your own domain name is also very important.
Yahoo is notoriously difficult to get into and your site must
have very good content to even be considered.
Luckily Google (today the KING of search engines) doesn't discriminate
against free hosted sites and all you need do is follow the 3
essential guidelines above and add some valuable content to your
product pages.
A few things to remember:
1) DO your research and use the right keywords. Here are 2 resources
that will help you find the best and most popular keywords for
your site: Overture's
free keyword suggestion tool and WordTracker.
2) DO use DIFFERENT METATAGS (Title, Description and Keywords)
for EACH PAGE of your site.
3) DON'T do anything that will get your site BANNED by the search
engines.
4) DON'T submit your site more than once a month, unless you
have made a lot of changes.
5) DON'T use automatic submission services that submit to "thousands
of search engines". Some search engines will view this as
spam.
6) DON'T submit your link to FFAs or you may be "demoted".
7) DON'T use methods to artificially boost your link popularity,
like joining "link popularity farms".
8) DON'T use link generating software that queries Google for
links. It may get your site penalised.
In Part
2 of this article, I shall cover how to build targeted traffic
using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Engines.
Priya
Shah is the editor of Be
a Whiz at eBiz!, a free-wheeling newsletter on Internet Marketing
and home business. She also publishes The
Glutathione Report, a newsletter featuring regular updates
on the health benefits of glutathione.

| Hot
Recommendations |
 |
|
| Internet
Mastery Center Blog |
| |