Getting more website visitors through Google, Bing and other search engines doesn’t have to be complicated. It may seem like it does, but I’m going to explain three easy to follow steps to getting more traffic even in just a week from now.

And importantly, this process can be followed again and again to bring in more and more traffic over time.

And, this process works great right now. Of course, it would be foolish of me to assume this will keep working for years, since things change so quickly online, and Google likes to change its mind quite often about how it ranks sites, but this is a straightforward process that gets results, and ‘plays by the rules’, so you’re not going to upset Google in the process.

So if you want more traffic, make the most of these tactics now:

Step One – Choose Your Keyword

Obvious, right?

Well, you can’t choose just any old keyword. If you decide upon ‘make money’ or ‘lose weight’, honestly, without a huge SEO budget you’re not going to get very far at all. Those markets are just too competitive for most owner run businesses.

But if you choose keywords that are so niche there’s hardly any competition, they’re easy to rank for, but they might result in one visitor a day, which isn’t going to get you particularly far either.

So frankly, you want to choose worthwhile keywords, that aren’t overrun with competition. And as mentioned, as you can go through this process as many times as you want, one keyword that gets you 10 visitors a day, can soon become 200 keywords that get you 10 visitors a day… all the effort put in will definitely be worthwhile when you reach that point.

Also – by targeting one keyword, you often end up getting traffic from ‘long tails’ related to the initial keyword, which can help multiply your traffic with no extra effort.

Okay, so how do you choose your keywords?

Well, if you know your market, you probably have an idea of what people are already searching for. And using the free Google Keyword Tool will give you more variations of this keyword, and also related terms.

Or, use the Google Keyword Tool to get keyword suggestions from the sites of your competitors.

Okay, so now you should have a long list of relevant keywords for the market you’re in.

How do you determine that they’re worth your time – and – don’t have too much competition?

Well, Google’s keyword tool can be helpful for that, letting you know competition levels for each keyword, and how much people are paying to advertise on that term.

Some terms you’ll find have lots of search traffic, but no one’s advertising on them. Those terms usually aren’t very valuable.

So once you have your list of keywords, start doing searches for them to see which kinds of sites come up, and also what kind of advertising appears for those terms.

Tools like SerpIQ and also the free SEO For FireFox (there’s also SEO Quake) all give you detailed information about the top 10 results for any keyword you’re interested in.

If the top 10 results for that term have a lot of high Page Rank sites, a lot of old sites… if most of the results are the root of the site (front page) rather than a sub page, those are all clues that the competition will be difficult to replace with your website.

That said, with the right linking strategy, and also especially if you have an aged domain and high Page Rank, those will all help you compete.

Or, start with the terms which it seems will be easiest to compete against, create content and links for those (more on that in a moment) and then you can start getting traffic through those terms, while at the same time increasing the age and authority of your site (more content + more links generally means more authority).

So by starting with the easier terms, and moving up from there you naturally start getting traffic while at the same time increasing your chances of competing in the very near future for the more competitive terms you’re also interested in.

Step Two – Create Your Content

Now, for each keyword you’re after, you want to create a page focused around that term on your site. If your site has a blog for example, you would write a blog post focused around that keyword phrase.

It’s important the content of your article is good, since Google is taking on board length of time people spend on your site now.

If you know your subject (or are happy to outsource the writing to someone who does) then creating good content shouldn’t take long. If you’re a slow writer, maybe consider using software like Dragon Naturally Speaking to make the process faster.

Also of course, high quality content greatly increases your chances of people naturally sharing your content on social network sites like Twitter and FaceBook, and linking to your site from their own site, without prompting.

And a further point to bear in mind – I would strongly suggest you keep at least 500 words in mind for the length of your articles or blog posts, but really 1,000 to 2,000 words is better.

If you’re happy to spend the time, and have the expertise enough to create a ‘resource level article’ (one so helpful and in depth that others link to it for years to come) that can be time very well spent.

And when writing your content focused around a keyword phrase, don’t overdo it, but aim to use that keyword within the article naturally at least two or three times.

And importantly, use it in the title of the piece so that it appears in the headline of the article, and in the browser’s title bar. And even better if you can use your keyword phrase at the start of the title.  For example:

If your keyword is “Blue Widgets in Atlanta”. Keeping that at the beginning of your title in the following way can be very helpful. It’s not 100% necessary if you feel it disturbs the impact of the title you have in mind, but it’s helpful if you can include it near the start perhaps in a way similar to this:

Blue Widgets in Atlanta — Are You One Of The
Many Having Trouble Locating These?

Or, you could simply use the keywords as part of the title, perhaps in the following way:

Are You One Of The Thousands Unable To Find Blue Widgets in Atlanta?

So what you’ve achieved once this is complete is high quality content focused around a certain keyword phrase.

This is the page that you’ll then be looking to get traffic to through the search engines directly, by running a link building campaign to it…

Step Three – Get Links

Now, unless a keyword has very little competition, you’re unlikely to get into the top 10 with no linking at all. So it’s time to start building keyword focused links to the page in question, to help Google bring it into the top 10 results, if not even better.

There’s a very wide number of options for building links to your site and also to certain pages on your site. But rather than overload you with choices, let’s start with two easy ways to start the link building and traffic generation process:

Social Bookmarking

Manually adding social bookmarks to sites like StumbleUpon, URL.org and others, linking to the page in question with your keyword as the linking text can be beneficial for both links, and also even some direct traffic from those bookmarks.

That said, manual social bookmarking is a time consuming process that frankly is a poor use of your time. Now there is software that’s meant to make this process easier but I find it rarely makes the task at hand easier, generally due to the learning curve involved and other hidden expenses.

What I’ve done for many of my own projects, before I moved into offering this to other businesses is giving the manual bookmarking work to others, so I get the benefits without wasting half a day on the process.

Even giving someone the task of creating 100 social bookmarks to your page can take a few hours of their time, but be surprisingly inexpensive for you and also can be very beneficial for your site rankings.

Guest Posts

These are also labor intensive links to get, but if done right can be very beneficial from both a traffic generation and link building standpoint.

The process is quite straight forward – create some of your best written content related to the subject matter of your site, make sure to include a link to your site either within the article itself, or in the byline (note about the author) at the bottom of the article, and then give this content to another site.

Now importantly, you’re not going to give your content away to any site. You’ll only give it away once so that it’s exclusive to the site you choose, and the site in question should ideally have high traffic and authority (Page Rank, age…etc.) in Google’s eyes.

So by publishing some of your best content on a high traffic authoritative site, this helps get you traffic as people click through from your article to your site, and it also gets you a very valuable link on a site Google thinks highly of.

So to link through your byline to your own site, using the keywords you’re after, a format similar to this can perhaps be used:

John Smith is the owner of Acme Corp that specializes in locating blue widgets in Atlanta for a wide customer base.

Now, creating high quality content has already been covered in the previous section of this article. So how do you find sites that want your content? Well, there’s a number of options:

Through Google

You can search for:

“related keywords” + guest post / guest author

For example:

“freight shipping” +”guest author”

Searches like these should help find you relevant sites that accept guest posts or articles.

Knowing Your Market

Simply by knowing on topic and popular sites in your niche, you can approach them regarding giving them some of your best content.

If you already have lots of examples of your writing on your site, and even better can link to sites that have published your content, it will help the process. And of course it’s important to promise the site (and keep to the promise) that the content will be 100% exclusive to them, permanently.

And through this process you can develop long term relationships with high traffic blogs that are happy to post your content even several times a year, potentially bringing you new customers (and creating valuable links) every time.

Guest Blogging Networks

Sites like My Blog Guest have built meeting places for writers looking for blogs to publish guest posts on, and vice versa. Such networks can be a good starting point to getting familiar with the guest blogging process, and potentially getting your content onto sites you may have not considered yourself.

Easy as 1-2-3

That’s the entire process:

1. Keywords
2. Content
3. Links

It’s a surprisingly straightforward method that works very well right now. And as it’s giving searchers what they want (relevant, quality content), this process should hopefully fare well even through the imminent ranking changes that Google regularly challenges us site owners with.

Of course there’s nuances in this entire process which will become easier as you go through it – for example, with time you’ll easily be able to recognize whether your site can compete for a certain keyword yet or not. And the content generation and link building process will become easier too the more you do it.

But as this is working right now, it’s important to start the process, even with just one low competition keyword, and as soon as you see your site pop up in the top 10, I’m sure you’ll be hooked, and will want to grow this to get your site into the top 10 results (if not in fact to number one) for as many keywords as possible, as quickly as possible.

3 Very Easy Steps To More Google Traffic is a post from: Build My Links

You can also download the slides from this video further down the page.

This video covers:

• Does link building still work?
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• Options for ‘do it yourself’ link building.
  .
• What you need to know about link velocity, diversity & keywords.
  .
• Why the age of your site is so important (and what to do about it).
  .
• Guidelines for your site’s content, especially after Google Panda.
  .
• In which order should you build links to your site, and how quickly?
  .
• How to get a brand new site into Google’s index.
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• How to jump up the search results very quickly (even into the top 10 in less than a week).
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• Different types of links to use for ranking your site.

Click here to view the slides of this video in PDF format.

If you have any questions at all about what’s presented in this video, please feel free to submit your questions in a comment below.

Link Building Masterclass – Crash Course Video is a post from: Build My Links

Now, both exist of course, but they’re a lot rarer than you may think.  And before I back up that argument, a bit of background…

Why Keep You Scared?

It’s in Google’s interest to keep website owners second guessing everything they do when it comes to the search engines.  Google knows that building links to your website helps your search engine rankings – but – they don’t want anyone gaming their search engine results.

So they have a massive PR campaign designed to scare webmasters into never building a link to their website!  And this campaign’s front man is of course the famous Matt Cutts.

Now, if you read through the Google Webmaster Guidelines, they consider any link that didn’t naturally appear (because another website owner wanted to link to you, with no ulterior motive) spam, basically.

All those noisy SEO specialists may say they’re ‘White Hat‘, but in fact they aren’t, because they’re still building links, and Google doesn’t want that.  Anyone who does any sort of link building, is not ‘White Hat’ in Google’s eyes.

But frankly, you don’t work for Google so that shouldn’t concern you.  The only thing that should concern you is:

• Can I get more search engine traffic?
  .
• And can I do that in such a way that won’t cause problems for my site?

.

Is There a Risk?

Now, with any sort of link building there’s a risk, albeit in most cases an absolutely tiny one, but it’s something to keep in mind.

That said, any of the following will make your link building a lot more risky:

• Are all your links of one type?
  .
• Are all your links low quality? (forum profile spamming, auto-approved blog comment spamming…etc.)
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• Is your site brand new? (less than three months)
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• Is the content on your site poor quality (barely readable) or spun private label content?

Here’s how to reduce the risk way down, while very likely getting surprisingly good results through the search engines:

• Let your site age at least a few months before doing aggressive link building.  Not necessary, but suggested.  That said, if your site is new, add content to it, and start doing some link building to it.  Don’t register a domain and do nothing with it until you need it… let it age before you’re ready to use it, if you can.
  .
• Get links from a wide range of sources – in-article links, blog comments, directories, bookmarks… this looks a lot more natural.
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• Try to keep link building regular, or even better keep steadily increasing what you’re doing – sending 10,000 links to a site one month, then nothing for three months does not look natural.  It’s good to keep things consistent, and the longer your site’s been around the more you can get away with, so consider increasing your link building campaigns as your site ages and the link diversity pointing to your site widens.
  .
• For any type of site, some link building is as close to risk free as you can find, including:
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• In-article links in unique articles
• Guest posts
• Squidoo Lenses
• Manual Social Bookmarking
• Manual commenting on high Page Rank blogs

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The Benefits Of #1

And if you make it into the top 10, or especially the top three, or the number one spot, you’ll find that because others start finding your site a lot more easily, you’ll naturally get links pointing to your site if it has useful/relevant content on it.  So getting to the top of the rankings can then become self-perpetuating, because people find you and naturally point more links to you.

White Hat or Black Hat?  Neither.

So forget white hat, but don’t imagine I’m pushing you to ‘black hat’ tactics.  Black hat includes hacking other people’s websites for links, and even more unsavory tactics.  There’s no way I can condone tactics like that.

So if no purposeful link building at all is approved by Google, then maybe you can keep in mind that you’re wearing a gray hat, if you need to think about such things at all…

The reason I mention all these ‘hats, is that I’ve found a lot of people looking for search engine optimization work are hung up on ‘white hat’ work, when there’s no such thing.

But if you want any kind of search engine traffic at all, you need to do link building.  You can’t sit around waiting for the next five years as maybe people stumble upon your site and link to it.

You need to be proactive and start the link building process yourself, if you’re serious about your business.  Check the list above again regarding how to keep risk way down, but really, unless you do something really stupid, there isn’t that much risk.  Especially of being banned from the search engines (I’ll give you an example in a moment).

You may be penalized and knocked down the rankings if 100,000 links suddenly point to your brand new site, but you can recover from that by regularly adding quality content, and with ongoing quality link building.

And also, you’ll find that if you go with one of those ‘White Hat’ services, they charge an absolute arm and a leg.  What they call White Hat link building (guest posts, paid submissions to top directories…) can run into tens of thousands quickly, but generally the clients they’re targeting have the budget for that kind of work.

Link Building For Businesses That Need Results

Most small and medium sized businesses don’t have tens of thousands to throw at link building work, especially when you don’t have to spend anywhere near $10k to get amazing results in the search rankings.

So if you’re a small or medium sized business that needs results, think ‘Gray’.  It’s not bad, it’s just that Google wouldn’t approve of it.  But you don’t work for them, so what’s important to their business shouldn’t be important to yours.

You can get amazing results with very little risk using these tactics, and you’re not even annoying anyone in the process, which definitely can’t be said for Black Hat tactics.

And on top of this, the search results are in constant flux with quite regular substantial algorithm (how Google calculates which site goes where) changes which shakes everything up a huge amount from time to time.  So to stay ahead of Google the best you can, you’ve got to keep link building, and you’ve got to make your site a worthwhile destination that people want to spend time on, and want to share/link to.

Even if your site is entirely a shopping site, at least add articles or a blog, and this makes getting links and getting ‘viral’ traffic a lot easier if the content is good.

Thinking ‘Social’

And now, as Google takes on board social signals much more these days (Twitter…etc.), getting mentions on Twitter and other sites becomes another form of link building, plus you get traffic.

Pulling It All Together

So bottom line:

• Don’t let Google scare you, even though it wants to.
  .
• Use common sense with your link building (keep it regular, start slow and build up, keep link quality high).
  .
• Make the content on your site good, and shareable if you can.
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• Get social signals pointing to your site.
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• Expect to bounce around the search results (especially after algorithm changes), but keep doing everything above to help you stay ahead of 99% of your competition.
  .
• When you get to number 1 (or even top 3 or top 10), people start linking to you naturally, helping to cement your rankings even more.
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• Don’t just depend on Google, use other forms of marketing, and especially encourage repeat visitors with a customer list, email newsletter list, FaceBook fan page, Twitter account…

Is ‘Banning’ The End?

Many years ago, I did something stupid with one of my sites and it got banned from Google.  Now, I forgot about this site, and checked back recently, and it’s now back in Google, Page Rank 3, and top 10 for a number of good searches.

So sites can always recover, nothing’s permanent when it comes to Google, and put things in your favor as much as possible by keeping to the ‘Pulling It All Together’ list above in mind.

Peering Through The Fog

And one last point…

There’s a lot of uncertainty in SEO because no one (except if you work at Google) knows exactly what’s going on behind the scenes.  This causes a lot of noise (very little of it of value) on forums.

And there’s also a lot of scare mongering and muddying of the waters.  Some SEO companies don’t really want to tell you what works, as they’re worried if they do this, no one would use their services.

Well, I don’t think like that.  There’s enough nonsense about SEO online so I don’t plan to add to it.

I know there’s no guarantees when it comes to SEO (anyone who says there is – run!) but I’ve seen what works with my own sites and with clients of mine.  The results you can get with link building and sensible on site planning can be huge, and can in some cases give you a huge Return On Investment on any money you’ve spent on link building.

And by telling you all this, I’m secure that you’ll still consider becoming a customer since link building is very time consuming, and most people either don’t want to do it themselves, don’t have the time, or aren’t sure what they’re doing.

That’s why I’m confident that even by ‘pulling back the curtain’ to show what’s really working in SEO without all the usual fluff and BS you get on SEO blogs, you’ll still be interested in giving us work.  But if you’re not, not worries, I hope this article was helpful at the very least.

So yes – don’t be scared!  And see you in the top 10…

Google Wants You To Be Scared is a post from: Build My Links