By: Codrut Turcanu

December 6th, 2003

Reader Rating: 7.5

Free, targeted search engine traffic sounds too good to be true, right?

Most people decide to pay for targeted traffic instead of putting in the time and learning the techniques to attract that traffic from the search engines for free. Not only that, some pay a lot of money to optimize their Website for a few keywords and never make a profit or gain a higher rank in the search engines. Others spend hundreds on pay-per-click search engines hoping to make big bucks… but it ends up costing them more than they earn.

It's time to save your money! In this article, I'll show you how to get free search engine traffic in 5 easy steps. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Choose your Keywords

It's very important to come up with 2 or 3 main keywords that a user in your niche or target audience might type into the search engine to find the kind of information that your site offers. A very useful tool you can use for this purpose is Good Keywords [1].

Beware! Never pick extremely popular keywords thinking that you'll gain a higher rank in a search engine. This is not how the system works; because they’re popular keywords, there’s more competition for them. You'll have better results in improving your rank if you find and choose less popular keywords. What represents a “good” keyword? I’d consider a good keyword to be one that was searched for approximately 1000 times or more in a given month.

For example, let's imagine we own a Website called my-web-hosting-provider.com, which we want to optimize for 2 main keywords. We use Good Keywords and soon find 2 ideal terms on which we can optimize the site: “quality Web hosting”, which was searched for 1553 times in the last month, and “Web hosting plan”, which received 2194 searches in the last month.

You might decide to optimize your site on more than 2 keywords, to make sure you gain the highest traffic levels possible for your efforts, however, each Web page you want optimize should not contain more than 2 main keywords. If it does, you'll be reducing your chances of getting the most highly targeted traffic possible.

Step 2: Investigate your Competitors

Go to the search engine for which you’re optimizing your site, and perform a search on your main keywords (in the case of our imaginary site, we’d search on “quality Web hosting” and “Web hosting plan”).

Within 5 seconds, you'll be presented with a list of sites with which you’re competing for the keywords you want to use.

Study each Website separately to gain an understanding of exactly why and how they ranked in the top 10. Take a look at their source file (from the “View” options in your browser) and see what keywords they target… but don't copy them!

The first 2 or 3 keywords listed should be the words they focused on as they optimized their site. The order in which sites list their keywords is important -- the sites could obtain the largest portion of the traffic they attract via those particular keywords.

Step 3: Write Your Website Title

What do you see written in the bar at the top of your browser?

That's what each visitor will read in the search engine results when they find your Website’s listing, so make sure you write an eye-catching title that’s related to your Website’s content, or your product, service, or offer.

To obtain an even higher ranking in the search engines, make sure your Title contains 1 or 2 of your main keywords. Yes, you can get a higher ranking if you use those same keywords in your title!

For example, the Title of our site, my-web-hosting-provider.com, might read:

Step 4: Start your Site Description with your Main Keywords

To gain a higher search engine ranking, write as your Website description a powerful headline that includes 1 or 2 of your main keywords (that’s right -– those same words you used in your Title).

If you have a banner or other graphic at the top of your Website, I suggest you find a way to remove it and use a headline or brief description (around 200 words or so) about your Website that includes your main keywords. What you write there will appear in the search engine results, so make sure you write something interesting, that compels your visitor to click on the link.

What might we write as the site description for my-web-hosting-provider.com? We might start it with something like this:

Step 5: Add Content, Content, and More Content

That's what your Website has to offer: content, be it in the form of articles, reports, tips, courses, or some other content type.

Each paragraph of content on your site should contain 1 or 2 of your main keywords. Take this approach to writing all your Website’s pages if you want to gain a higher rank in the Search Engines for those keywords.

Remember, too, that the more pages you add to your Website, the more hits you can gain for a particular keyword. Search engines give a higher ranking to Websites that offer many pages filled with high quality content. Text is king -- forget about banners!

Take a look at your Website stats and you’ll see listed all the searches your visitors type into the search engines to find your site. If we were to check the statistics for my-web-hosting-provider.com, we might notice that the site receives visitors who search on keywords that we didn’t optimized the pages for (e.g. “low-cost Web hosting plan”). To help us gain a better ranking for that keyword, we might create a mini-article (of around 300-500 words) in which we start each paragraph of the article with the keyword, “low-cost web hosting plan.”

Rank in the Top 10 and Get Free, Targeted Search Engine Traffic

Put into practice each of the above 5 steps, and you'll succeed! The Google bot should spider your Website and be displaying your site in the search results in less than 30 days.

I achieved top 10 rankings on google.com for several (not very popular, but fairly powerful) keywords, using the process I’ve described here. After you implement the process, keep a close eye on your rankings. Tweak your site, test and monitor your tactics, but never give up!

[1] http://www.goodkeywords.com