Getting web traffic from internet is a major prerequisite for any website to work. Without traffic, your blog won’t be able to survive as your ads wont be getting any clicks. Its as simple as that. Irrespective of the concept on which a website works, without traffic it is nothing. To be honest, driving traffic to my site was one of the primary difficulty that I faced when i was starting out. It can be quite frustrating initially when you do not see the results. As such, I am here to share with you my experiences, both my successes and failures to help you avoid the pitfalls and climb to the top!
There are core methods and strategies on how to get free web traffic either online or offline. Usually, Offline methods are the least used methods to generate web traffic while online methods are preferred.
There are many sources on web from where you can drive traffic to your website.
Ranking In Search Engine Pages
If you didnt know by now, nearly 60% of your overall traffic will actually come from the search engines! Which means that it is very important for your blog to rank high within the first page of search engine results.
Most searchers will NEVER browse past the third search results page, much less visit the links and sites listed there!
Key SEO Strategies
In order to be successful in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), you will need to engage in effective and important SEO strategies. As such, you will need to know what the search engines are focussing on and looking out for.
Keywords
To determine what is important on a page, search engines look for keywords, or key phrases. These keywords are usually entered as part of a search query. Search engines will find keywords on a web page,and then determine the importance of the keyword on the page.
The search engine notes the location of the keyword on the page, an how many times the keyword appears on the page. If your keywords are buried near the bottom of a page, it will definitely rank lower than a page with keywords placed near the top.
For example, if the keyword “tea” is searched and your page includes this keyword in your first header, then the search engine will consider your page as a good match for that search. Unless your keywords are placed in a prominent position and used regularly, you probably will not rank high for that particular search.
On the other hand, giving prominent placement to irrelevant keywords can cause your search rankings to fall! For example, if you have a site about food, but the keywords “sports” appear multiple times on your page, it will more likely be viewed as a site about health and fitness.
Search engines will then drive wrong visitors to your site, and pull down
your search rankings since your website is considered as a lousy health and fitness site.
Importance Of Your Site's Keywords
Perhaps to some extent, we can claim that SEO revolves around the use of your site's keywords. Whether its the content, or the underlying codes, your keywords are used to give your page a massive impact. As such, it is vital for you to earn how to come out with a list of relevant keywords and how to utilise them on your site well enough. You need to get inside of your customers heads, and determine what they are likely to search in their queries!
Keyword Density
Noting that the more often your keywords are used in your content, the easier will search engines be able to find your pages. However, if you use your keywords too many times, search engines will think that you are actually “keyword stuffing” your pages, with no regard for quality content! When this actually happens, do not be surprised if your find your page ranking decreasing, or even disappear off search engine's search results!
Thus, you need to determine the precise keyword density when trying to optimize the content of your page. This depends on whether you have
many different keywords. If so, you can have a keyword density of approximately 20% and still rank well. If you only have a small handful of keywords on a short page, then its best to bring the keyword density lower to 5%. Keeping this in mind, ensure that the keywords flow smoothly and sound natural!
HTML Tags
Search engines also pays attention to the invisible text on your site – HTML codes, or more specifically, the metadata in the code. The metadata should include your site's name and keywords, which is listed within the tag. The tag can be found at the top of your HTML document before the tag and its contents.
A typical tag should look like this:
Ensure that your site's metadata is well detailed, as it could provide search engines with a good idea what content to expect from your page.
Optimizing Your Site's HTML Tags
It is also possible to utilise your keywords in your site's HTML coding as well. Search crawlers will crawl through specific HTML tags to get a rough glimpse of what your page is all about. Even though you might not know much about HTML, there are a few main tags that are relatively easy to work on.
Tags</font></div><div style="text-align: center;"><font size="5">Lets start with your page's title. It provides an overview of what your entire page or content is all about to readers and search crawlers. It is thus effective to include keywords in the title tag.</font></div><div style="text-align: center;"><font size="5">The title is obviously the first place that search crawlers reach to determine the content of your page. The search crawlers will then scan keywords and phrases that appear in these tags and store them in its search engine index. Your page's title will also be what the search engine uses as a listing name.</font></div></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><font size="5">You can easily find the <HTML> title tag at the top of your document, before your body text starts. It will look something like this:</font></div><div style="text-align: center;"><font size="5"><TITLE> Insert your title here
All you have to do is just insert your keywords in between the title tags.Keep in mind that your title cannot exceed more than 64 characters. It would be beneficial if your title includes your keywords, but you can always place keywords in after the name of your page.
For example, if you have a page named 'Indoor Sports', you can key in the following tag:</font></div><div style="text-align: center;"><font size="5"><TITLE>Indoor Sports: Basketball, Netball, Floorball
Search engines will then link your page to queries regarding the types of indoor sports!
Tags
These tags contains data about your page (metadata) for search crawlers to scan through. It is possible to insert multiple tags into the head of your document, like this:
Sportshub
From the above example, you can see that there are two main attributes, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS. The CONTENT attribute is used to define the content or keywords for the description.
The DESCRIPTION text is used as a promotional blurb that briefly describes the content of your page. You should only use keywords sparingly and naturally here. On the other hand, the KEYWORDS attribute is used to inform the search engines what keywords your page is actually targeting, and is thus okay to stuff keywords within the tag!
Anchor Text
You can also use keywords as anchor texts on your pages. Search engines determine the value of a link, whether inbound or outbound, by looking at your anchor texts. It allows search crawlers to know that the site that you linked to is related to the keyword, thus making the link a relevant one.
You can create the link for anchor texts manually by using basic HTML.
However, such linkings would already be done automatically by most webpages!
Inbound Links
Web rankings can be somewhat compared to a popularity contest – a high quality site would attract more traffic and visitors. Google rates inbound links very highly, and if a site has many relevant sites linking to it, its pagerank would increase. To Google, the more links to a given site, the more useful and helpful will the site be for users.
This is because Google and Yahoo rank websites according to how many quality backlinks they find pointing at your website. Quality is determined by how relevant the other site is to your site and where the link is placed on their page (within the content is best) and how many other links are on the page (less is better). A large number of links pointing at your site does not guarantee success. You need quality backlinks in order to climb to the first page of results and the more you can find, the better.
As you can see below
www.aboutteas.com
is ranked first on Google Search Results page for the keywords “about Teas”! I wouldnt say that its an easy feat, but I believe that you can do it too!
