How to use SEO to get traffic

In internet marketing, your success depends on your ability to get traffic. Not just any traffic will do though. You need targeted traffic that will click on ads and/or buy products. In other words, you need traffic with high conversion, meaning it will convert into clicks or sales. The most consistent and reliable way to achieve this is by targeting search engine traffic. Therefore, I am going to go over how to use SEO to get traffic.

What is SEO? The letters stand for Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, that means trying to rank well with the search engines. Well, that's not exactly true. It means trying to rank well in Google, because the big G is the big dog in the search engine world. Google accounts for over half of all the search engine volume. However, in general, if you are able to rank well in Google, you will tend to rank well with the other search engines as well.

There are two main aspects of SEO: on-page SEO and link building.

On-page SEO is exactly what it sounds like. Tailoring the individual page so that Google ranks it well for whatever keywords you are targeting. While this is important, keep in mind it is less than ten percent of what decides how well you will rank in Google. To be honest, it is probably less than one percent. However, if you are trying to compete for a highly contested keyword, then it can put you over the top. So don't neglect this part just because it is a small piece of the puzzle.

The first things the Google bot will look at as it crawls the page are the HTML title, or the words seen at the top of the window, and the URL. Ideally, your main keyword should be in each. From there, it will begin to look at the content, starting with the post title, which should contain your keyword as well. Then, it moves on to the body of the post, going from top to bottom. The main keyword should be mentioned multiple times in the body, so that Google knows what the page is about. Although you need to take special care not to put it in there too many times. If G thinks you are keyword stuffing, then your site will get flagged as spam and removed from Google's index. As long as you make sure your article reads naturally, you shouldn't have to worry about this. The goal is to produce good content, not spam.

Now here comes the really important part, link building. When learning how to use seo to get traffic, this is where most fail. This is partially because so few understand it, but it is also because this often requires a lot of work. The main thing that Google looks at to determine a website's rank is the number of links pointing to the page, along with the quality and relevancy of those links. When a website links to another site with a certain keyword in the anchor text, it is seen as an endorsement for the linked site by the site owner, for that keyword. For this reason, you should put 90 percent of the work for your site toward getting links with your keywords in the anchor text.

Many internet marketers wrongly assume that any old backlink will do, and quantity is the only thing that matters. Thus, they spend much of their time putting links in blog comments and forum posts. The problem is that those links are of so little quality that they are pretty much useless. They pass very little link juice to your site, and they may even hurt your rankings if you go overboard. You want your links in the actual content of the page.

In an effort to help everyone understand all of this, I am going to briefly describe what the search engines look for in links. They like links from sites with a lot of authority, in other words high page rank. Its even better if the individual post or page the link is on contains content that is related to the page/site it is linking to. If the site itself is related to your site, that improves things further. The more authority and the more relevancy, the better.

The link profile for your site also needs to look natural. Would it be natural for a site to only have backlinks pointing to the main page? Is it natural for every link pointing to a site to have only one keyword in the anchor text. Of course not. There needs to be a nice, healthy mix of links. While most of the links will be for your main keyword, there also need to be plenty of links for other related keywords. Not only does this make the link profile more natural, but you will get more traffic if you can expand your keyword relevancy to many related keywords. Expanding keyword relevancy is one of the best ways to grow your site. I will go into further detail on that subject in another post. For now, just do it to make sure you have a natural link profile.

Be careful about what kinds of site you are getting your links from. It used to be that Google would not punish you for any link. At worst, it would just not count a link if it was considered spammy. Recently, in an effort to remove spam sites from the index, Google has changed this policy. Now a bad link can actually hurt your rankings, instead of just not improve them.

Don't let this scare you. This is a good thing for people like us. It means there will be less competition. As long as you keep your nose clean, this should benefit you in the long run.

There is a lot more to the subject of backlinks, but that is the basic idea. I will go into more detail in future posts.

These are the basics of how to use SEO to get traffic. Stay tuned for more detailed posts about the individual parts.