So you have had your idea, you have finally created your site and slaved over the content. So well done, take a breath you have done a fine thing.
So it would be nice to think people will flock to your site, but alas, this isn’t the case and you have a little bit more work to do.
How do I get people to come to my website and see what I have to say? and how do I get real free traffic to my website?
Now if you have a site up and running then you know how hard it can be just to get to this point, you have had to solve the following problems:
- Having an idea for a site
- Finding the right domain
- Pointing the domain to your host
- Building the actual site and theme
- Writing the content and creating images for your site
If you aren’t tired and haven’t given up by now, then you know that you have one last big hurdle, There is this question of driving traffic to your site.
Google and other search engines will rank your site based on quality, original content and what keywords you are targeting. It needs this information to know how to categorise you site and where to display it.
Google spiders will crawl your site, find the keywords in your text and then display your site based on these factors.
One of the most important things is that you give value to the visitors and create rich long content that stands out from the rest.
Google likes original content and it likes nice interlinking pages that are all related to a main theme, Google also doesn’t respond well to duplicated content.
If you just copy and paste content from other pages google will know and will respond in kind by sending your site to the void where it will never be seen again.
Lots of gurus online will say that content is king, this can be true and if you make large content rich sites, then over time they will rank well.
This is a good avenue to go down if you are going for organic traffic and if you pick a good non-competitive niche you might only have to write a 4 -5 pages to get some decent traffic to your pages.
Some might say that sites with very targeted keywords and phrases, but little content, are doomed to fail.
This actually isn’t true you can make smaller sites with just a few pages, but still get visitors to your site, its more about the quality of your content and if you can answer a question with fewer words, why wouldn’t you?
Many visitors may want an answer to a question, if this is the case less content may be better and keeping the answer above the fold may be an advantage.
If that same visitor has to trawl through pages and pages of writing to find the answer they may just end up going elsewhere.
Keywords and key-phrases are actually search query’s that people input into google everyday in order to get some relevant answers back.
Keywords give us the exact intent of what searchers are looking for.
So on one side we have a site with content on it and keywords relating to a theme or niche, on the other side of the equation you have people that are actively searching for these phrases or from there point of view answers to specific question or search terms.
It makes sense now that if you can find out what people are searching for and use the same search terms to drive the people to your site then…
Booooooooooooooom!
Now there are keywords that you will want to rank for and some that you don’t, some will have very high competition which means it will be almost impossible for you to rank for them.
If people are searching for keywords or key-phrases google wants to serve them the most relevant information from the best quality highest rank sites.
If there are other high authority sites out there that are targeting the same keywords but doing a better job of it then they will obviously rank higher
The idea would be to target other keyword and phrases that don’t have so much competition.
You want to aim for the lower hanging fruit the keywords that have less searches and lower competition
If you want a really quick way to increase website traffic start by typing your niche or interest into the search bar, you will notice that google will try and predict what you are looking for based on other searches other user have made.
It does this by showing you a drop down list of related searches, this is great information because this is google telling us what other people are looking for.
This is a great way to look for alternate search phrases that you can include in your site, you can then use those keyword to optimise your pages to give more relevant information for terms that people are actually searching for.
Another thing you can do is after searching for your chosen keyword, scroll down to the bottom of the page and have a look at the related traffic search terms that google has suggested again related to your keywords.
Now we know that these phrases are being searched for because these are the search terms that another person has actually entered into the search bar.
We also know that this is good information because it is simply google wanting to provide the most relevant data to its users.
And we know that this information will benefit your user experience and aims to get you to the right information quicker.
You could now take all this data and target these specific keywords and optimise you site with those, rather than targeting some random keywords or phrases that you made up and that have absolutely no search volume.