It’s undeniable that the one thing you need to succeed in your online business is traffic. And free traffic beats everything else. So where do we get free traffic? Google and other search engines.

How does free search engine traffic work?

The process works in a way that you have experienced many many times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter the words you’re interested in. And click one of the links that shows up. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. 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. What’s even more amazing is the the first 3 links get more than 70% of the free traffic.

So, obviously your site needs to be in the first page of results to get free traffic from Google. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. And this bring us to…

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a measure of how well Google and other search engines think your website matches the search terms people are typing into their search boxes. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. 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.

To get indexed, you have to help Google find your site. And the best way for Google to find you is to get inbound links from other sites. Because Google already knows about these sites, it will follow the new links to you.

A couple of great places to do this are in your Twitter or Facebook profiles. Google visits these sites many times every day. So any new links will be followed right away.

Gaining ranking

After getting indexed, you need to work on your search engine ranking. Google has billions of pages indexed, so just getting into their database does not mean anyone will see you.

The 3 factors in getting ranked:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

Great content

This is the SEO work you do on your page. You need to make sure your content matches the search terms you’re going after. The topic of this article is clearly SEO. 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.

In addition to the content on the page, other things to keep in mind are the title tags on the page, and the domain name itself. These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.

Link juice

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. The more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be.

Article spinning is a super easy way to get a bunch of inbound links. To use this technique you write articles related to the topic of your websites. Then you have to create multiple versions of this articles. And then upload a different versions to a bunch of sites that allow you to add content. And the more you do the better.

Make your site active

And lastly, it’s seems clear that Google expects important pages to be actively updated. A page that was created 3 years ago and hasn’t been touched since won’t rank well. Google expects you to be updating your site regularly. RSS feeds are an easy way to keep your content changing.

Comments from other people on your page are another fantastic way to keep your content updated. So, obviously, you need to get people to visit your site on your own, too. An easy way to do this is from forums.

Create profiles on lots of forums about your site’s topic. Visit often and make posts. And link back to yourself in your signature file. This gets you inbound links. And it will also get real visitors to your site.

Conclusion

Each step listed above is critical. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And posting your content all over the web is time consuming. 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.

The most important thing in any web business is traffic – lots and lots of traffic. The other 1% is what you do with that traffic, but if you have to traffic – you can figure out the rest. What you do with the traffic when it gets to your site could be any number of things. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.

Here are some tips for generating website visitors:

These are the best and fastest ways to get free visitors coming to your site:

• Web 2.0
• Articles Directories
• Video Sites

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Sites

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. And that’s important to you because it means that Google and the other search engines treat links from these sites as more meaningful than links from other sites. By placing links to your websites in this content you’ve created, you get traffic from the site and search engine ranking for the keywords you choose. This is the hidden benefit of using Web 2.0 sites. Getting free web 2.0 traffic is a big topic that we’ll discuss more later. This is good overview of the reason to get into it, though.

Article Websites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. In typical web 2.0 fashion, article sites rely on user-generated content (i.e. your articles). And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And because the terms of the directory say they have to include your “resource box” you get links back from all these other sites, too. If you want to generate traffic from articles follow these steps:

• First, spend the time to determine your keywords
• Write specifically to target these keywords
• Hyperlink these keywords to your website – both in the content of the article and in your author’s info section.

Video

And finally, we need to talk about getting traffic from videos. Once again, this is really a sub-set of web 2.0. So, just like article marketing, video marketing enables you to add content to authority sites. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

OK, so how do you do effective video marketing?

• Get a YouTube account
• Make your profile uncluttered by turning off all the modules
• Add tags to your profile
• Make sure to include in your profile a link to your site
• Add 1 or more videos to your profile
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Summary:

If you take action on the items listed here you’ll have free traffic in no time.

Visitors to your site are critical – getting them there automatically is even better. Here’s how…

Traffic is useless . . . unless…

Keyword research is really the first step in getting traffic to your website. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.

Here are the important considerations for your research:

• Will you be able to rank for these keywords? You’ll have to analyze the competition and see what’s out there for this.
• Will the keywords you’re targeting bring buyers? Certain keywords are good for generating a lot of visitors who don’t buy anything. What you want is buyers!
• Another thing to think about is affiliates. Nothing brings more buyers like an army of affiliates. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

Of course, this all takes time if you plan to do it yourself. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. And that’s why most people skip this step! The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. Using tools like this speed up the process and improve your results, too!

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.

Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…

• Surveys
• “Traffic Traps”
• Video

Surveys

Here’s the thing – people love surveys. It’s human nature. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. This allows you to get free website traffic from other people’s sites! Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Help” Websites

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. But, like the surveys, that’s not why you’re going to pay attention to these sites. The other thing they can be used for is to get traffic to your site, leads for your business and sales! Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. The good news is that it’s easy to find website traffic software that can do this automatically. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video Sharing Sites

Another great resource is video sharing sites like YouTube. These sites generate massive traffic and people watch over 2 billion videos a day on YouTube alone . If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. You can even take a webpage or article that you’ve written. Then simply record yourself reading the text and you video the screen with a simple screen capture program. And like anything else, there is software available that will turn articles into videos for you automatically.

The Bottom Line…

Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. Just be a creative and think outside the box a bit. And today there are tons of options for software tools that can help with every part of this process.

Get started right away:

• Keyword research first is key
• Then create some surveys born to go viral
• Take advantage of the “help” sites
• And definitely include video sharing sites