One of the biggest problems that anyone online has is how to get traffic to their site. There are a lot of supposed easy traffic hacks, and some of them are actually successful, but the easiest way to get traffic is to optimize your website or blog for the search engines. The bad news is that getting traffic from the search engines doesn’t happen overnight. The good news is that if you put the right SEO solutions into place, you can get traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines that doesn’t cost you a penny. There are a couple of other important points to consider as well, which we’ll go into below.
Why Bother With SEO Solutions If They Take Time?
The best reason that I can come up with to focus on SEO is that there is a built in credibility that only the search engines can give you. Think about that for a second. How often do you pay attention to the internet location that you are clicking on? Not often, right? For instance, if you click on a link in an ad block, do you pay attention to where it will take you? Or do you just click because the site caught your eye? And how often have you clicked on a link when it wasn’t really what you were looking for? My guess is that more often than not, you end up clicking on something just for the heck of it, and not necessarily because it is so laser focused to your search activities at that particular moment. While this may be an okay thing for companies with thousands of dollars per day to spend on advertising, it isn’t a good thing for those who are trying to market information or products online. Not many can afford to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars per day on advertising and still break even of turn a profit. What optimizing for the search engines does then, is lend instant credibility that is basically free of charge. Sure, it may take some money to fully optimize and send the signals that you need to rank highly for competitive keywords and search phrases, but in general, this is going to be a much lower expense than if you were getting traffic only through paid means.
You’re Off Topic, Talk About Credit Again
Right, back to credit through search. The thinking since various algorithmic updates from Google throughout 2011 is that the search giant has figured out how to filter junk sites out of the mix. This is largely true, but only to an extent. For instance, there may be a site that looks terrible and doesn’t have anything that particularly jumps out to the visitor, but it ranks highly for competitive and high traffic search phrases. Then, there may be another site that has an awesome design and all sorts of bells and whistles, but the site doesn’t rank well, or it can’t hold its rank for long and finds itself “Google slapped” from a top 5 ranking to the 200′s, or worse. What is the difference? Credibility. And credibility is achieved through being what you say you are going to be. This applies to websites as well. You follow? If not, then maybe this will help to illustrate the point: You go out to a bar with some friends, and you meet up with an old buddy who has told you that he is a lawyer, and will be coming straight from work. Except when you get there, he is in a food stained undershirt, torn jeans etc. Now, we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but in this case, your friend’s image is not congruent with what he claims is his profession is. It could be, but the image doesn’t fit. It’s not what you expected to see. Search works more or less the same. You may be looking for search engine optimization information when you find a particular site, but if instead you find information that only has to do with PPV traffic, you’re not finding what you expected to find. And that is where the Google and other search engine changes come into play. They seem to be much better at spotting sites that just don’t match to what they are supposed to be ranking for. Why would they do this? Simple. Google and other search engines make money, for the most part, from advertising. Advertising is dependent on people finding what they need in the search engine results. It’s all about user experience. If they feel that a site isn’t working out well for the user, they may very well blast you off the map. And to top it off, the algorithms are getting rather impressive in their ability to find out whether the content on the site is relevant to the link and other signals to rank for a term. Thus, if you rank highly, you are considered to be of a high degree of relevance and value. Thus, instant credibility that only the search engines can give you. Below then, are three tips for the early phase of a website’s life, or even the initial SEO push for an established website.
So What SEO Solutions Should You Focus On First For This Credibility?
To begin with, focusing on your content is the best way to lend yourself credibility in the search engines, but more importantly, to develop credibility and a relationship with your readers. Even if you are only looking to develop small niche sites, presenting the best content that you can, that is relavent to your readers’ interests is at the top of all SEO solutions.
SEO Solution #2
After that, it is probably best to ensure that your site is loading quickly, and that you have an easy to navigate structure on your sites. For those reading this, there is a simple (and FREE) plugin called W3 Total Cache (get it here , or find it in the plugins tab-search for it- in your WordPress dashboard), that will enable you to keep your site from getting bogged down and loading slowly. User experience can easily be ruined by a slow loading site.
SEO Solution #3
And third, is to start thinking about how you will tell people that your site even exists. A lot is made of back links, which are still the number one SEO factor when it comes to what goes on off of your site (off site SEO), but what kind of a strategy do you have to achieve this? I personally think that a strong social media push is a good way to get going. Google has noted that they prefer to see great content that encourages others to give you those natural links. We can argue all day long about whether this is even possible to achieve success in this day and age of the bloated and crowded internet, but it is still what they want. So, a way to encourage this is to spread the word on social media. Facebook, bookmarking services (like Digg), and Twitter are a good way to get some early traffic, and to get people to start linking to you. There are a lot of SEO solutions that I’ll be bringing up as this blog continues to grow and expand. Do me a favor and click the like button down below if you know someone who can benefit from this post or others on the site, and please leave a comment below with your thoughts.
