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Building Targeted Traffic (Part 1)

by Priya Shah

There are 2 ways of getting targeted traffic from search engines or directories:

1) FREE Search Engine Traffic
2) PAY-PER-CLICK Search Engine Traffic

Free Search Engine Traffic

Why is Search Engine Marketing so important?

The statistics speak for themselves:

- 91% of Internet users use search engines to navigate the web.
- 9 out of 10 searches are done from the top 20 search engines.
- 85% of search engine users do not look past the first 40 results.
- 77% of Internet users employ search engines more frequently than any other online media as the leading vehicle for discovering websites, surpassing banner ads, web links, e-mail links, etc.

When you do a search, how many pages of results do you go through? If you're like most people you won't go further than the first 3 pages, unless you didn't find what you were looking for in the first 3.

To get your site placed in the first 3 pages requires what is called Optimization, or in plain English, making your site search-engine friendly.

Although "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO is a very specialised field and takes a lot of time to excel at, there are 3 essential factors that you need to make your website more search engine friendly.

1) USEFUL CONTENT: This is what users want and what search engines would like to offer—sites with good, useful content about the topic of the search. Even a few pages of useful content about your product will get you into the search engine's good books, but it is unlikely to get you in the first 3 pages.

2) RELEVANT KEYWORDS: Describing your site simply by adding a Page TITLE and DESCRIPTION that contains your main keywords.

In SEO jargon, these are called 'Metatags' and they must be placed in the 'Head' of your document, i.e. they are the FIRST thing the search engines see when they visit your site to index it.

Guidelines for Metatags:

- TITLE (not more than 60 characters long),
- DESCRIPTION (not more than 150 characters long)
- PAGE COPY (as long as necessary).

Your Title is also the most important because it is displayed in the search results. A good title would be one that contains your main keywords AND is inviting or interesting enough to make a potential customer/lead click on it.

3) LINK POPULARITY: Search engines like Google, give more emphasis to sites that are popular. So if you have many sites linking to you by a method called "Reciprocal Linking"—providing a link back to a site that also links to you—you will get a higher search engine ranking.

You can see this in practice here on my links pages:

http://www.1whey2health.com/links.htm
http://www.1whey2health.com/bizcentre.htm

Reciprocal links from sites related to your site topic or to the products you are selling, count more than unrelated links. In time, these links themselves could become an excellent (and more permanent) source of traffic than search engines.

Tips For Search Engine Promotion

With human-edited directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (from where Google takes some of its results), having your own domain name is also very important.

Yahoo is notoriously difficult to get into and your site must have very good content to even be considered.

Luckily Google (today the KING of search engines) doesn't discriminate against free hosted sites and all you need do is follow the 3 essential guidelines above and add some valuable content to your product pages. 

A few things to remember:

1) DO your research and use the right keywords. Here are 2 resources that will help you find the best and most popular keywords for your site: Google AdWord Keyword Tool and WordTracker.

2) DO use DIFFERENT METATAGS (Title, Description and Keywords) for EACH PAGE of your site.

3) DON'T do anything that will get your site BANNED by the search engines.

4) DON'T submit your site more than once a month, unless you have made a lot of changes.

5) DON'T use automatic submission services that submit to "thousands of search engines". Some search engines will view this as spam.

6) DON'T submit your link to FFAs or you may be "demoted".

7) DON'T use methods to artificially boost your link popularity, like joining "link popularity farms".

8) DON'T use link generating software that queries Google for links. It may get your site penalised.

In Part 2 of this article, I shall cover how to build targeted traffic using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Engines.

Priya Shah runs blogging courses at BlogBrandz and is the author of Number One In Your Niche.

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