Getting to the top of the search engines and being found by potential customers is no easy task. In fact, it takes a lot of time and energy to develop an effective search engine strategy for your business. This is probably the reason that none of the "gurus" ever talk about search engines, except for pay per clicks, as a way to develop real traffic to your site. The problem here is that the cost of pay per click can quickly become prohibitive. However, if you want to send tons of TARGETED traffic to your site, and do it for years to come, there are three ways that work and will always work if you apply them consistently. 1. Search Engine Optimization This is the first place you need to start. Learn how to actually optimize your site for the search engines. When you optimize your website for the search engines, you're not actually optimizing your site for your keywords, you optimize individual pages. This gives you a lot of flexibility because you can optimize different pages for different keywords. What's most important here is to make sure that you optimize your pages for the right keywords. The easiest way to do this is to do a search for your keywords. There are plenty of searchy tools available on the internet, but one of the best is Good Keywords, http://www.keywords.com. It's also free. It will also help you find related keywords and keyword combinations. The more times a keyword is searched for, and the fewer the pages there are in the search engines for a keyword or keyword phrase the better the keyword. 2. Site Maps There are two types of site maps you should be aware of. The first type is a list of everything on your site. This is primarily for humans visiting your site, but it also makes it easier for all of the search engines to spider your sites because your links are all listed on one page. The other type of site map is an xml file. This type of site map will help you in getting spidered by Google. However, if you can get a good thorough spider by Google, then you'll be able to get easily spidered by other search engines because they spider one another. You can get more information building site maps at Google.com. They also offer plenty of free tools and scripts you can use to easily build a site map. 3. Linking Building links to your site will help you because you'll have more places on the internet where you can be found. However, it isn't good enough to have lots of links pointing to your site. You need relevant links, that is, sites that are related to, and complement, your site. I recommend that you apply the rule of five here: try to add your site to at least five new sites per day. At the end of the year, you could have over 1,500 links pointing back to your site. You can also use a site like Link Metro, http://www.linkmetro.com. Although you can get a lot of link offers here very quickly, you want to make sure that you only choose sites that are related to yours and that your link isn't buried somewhere on the site. You shouldn't have to click more than twice from the main page in order to find your link. If you do, even if the site is related, reject this link because it probably won't do you any good. Although search engine optimization can be an involved marketing technique, it's free, and it will bring targeted traffic to your site. Choose classic search engine optimization techniques that always work, and you can quickly raise your rankings and drive targeted traffic to your site. |
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