There is no doubt that website traffic is critical to your business success. And nothing beats free traffic. Where does free traffic come from? Google and other search engines.

How does free search engine traffic work?

This is something you’ve experienced first hand countless times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter in a word or phrase you want to research. Then you click on one of the pages that in displayed. Well, the link you clicked on just send free traffic to that website owner. We will be discussing here how to get website traffic to you for free.

Most people only click results from the first couple pages. The truth is that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. And what’s more, the first 3 get over 70% of the clicks.

So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. And that means you need to be “ranked” in the top 10 by Google. And this bring us to…

What is search engine optimization?

Search Engine Optimization means that Google thinks your site matches what people are typing into their search box. It’s a complex formula that only people working for Google know exactly. However, we do know a few things that count.

Getting indexed

First, before you can get ranked highly, Google has to know you exist. This is known as being “indexed.” When your website gets indexed, Google stores information about it in their massive database.

Google needs to actually find your site in order to index it. Getting a link from another site will accomplish this easily. Because Google already knows about these sites, it will follow the new links to you.

Use your Twitter and Facebook updates to get quick indexed links to your site. Because these sites are indexed multiple times every day. So your new link will get indexed very quickly.

Gaining ranking

Once you have been indexed, you will start working on increasing your rank. Google has billions of pages indexed, so just getting into their database does not mean anyone will see you.

Here’s what’s important in ranking:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

Great content

This is the SEO work you do on your page. And it means that the content on your page matches the keywords you’re targeting. Clearly this article is about search engine optimization. One way Google figures this out is from the fact that it contains the term SEO. Another reason is because there are related words, like website traffic, too.

You also need to make sure the title tags, outbound links and the domain itself match the topic of the page. Google uses all of this content to figure out what your site is really about.

Your links

The next thing to consider is your links. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. It’s very important that you have more links coming in than you have going out. So the number of inbound links is important.

A very easy way to get a lot of links to your site is through article marketing. To accomplish this you start by writing an article that targets the keywords you’re after. Then create a bunch of different versions of it. Because you’re going to post a unique copy of it to lots of different websites. And quantity is the key here – so do lots and lots.

Make your site active

Finally, we know that Google gives you credit for the activity on your site. Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time. So you need to update your pages often. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.

Another great way to keep your page content fresh is to enable comments on it and allow others to discuss your page topic. This means you need to get real live people to your site, as well. Online forums are simple source of real live visitors.

Set up forum profiles with the ones related to your website. Then become active in the forum. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This gets you inbound links. And it gets people to visit the site you link to.

Conclusion

Each step listed above is critical. But let’s face it, writing multiple versions of the same article. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And visiting all the sites to post up your comments and articles takes a really long time. Which means you probably won’t end up doing it.

However, rank builder software exists. And it automates everything we’ve just talked about. So, use your time wisely and automated to tedious tasks. Otherwise, you won’t do it at all. And if you don’t do it, you simply will not ever get free traffic from Google.