There are few ways to get traffic, free and paid, but there’s not doubt that Google is the biggest and the most consistent source for both.
Taking your site to the top of Google results for your keywords is what SEO is all about. In essence, there are two steps in order to achieve this – on-page SEO which ensures your page is relevant to the keyword and off-page SEO which involves getting backlinks. If you’ve selected your keywords with competition in mind, getting to the first page of Google is a straighforward task.
The on-page part of this process is very simple, all you need to do is make sure that:
- Your keyword is in the page title
- You have the keyword in h1 tags
- You have your keyword mentioned in the content of the page at least few times
On-page SEO is really only a small part of what Google considers important, so even if only include the keyword in the title and maintain good off-page SEO, you will be fine. However, it is important to note that these elements define how your listing will be displayed to the people who search. For that reason you must make sure your title not only includes the keyword (which is bolded in the results), but also that it is attractive. Also make sure to include an attractive meta description, because that will also have influence as to how many people will click your result and not others.
Off-page SEO is a whole science. It has many strategies and methods to it, as well as many assumptions and myths. Google doesn’t disclose what brings a certain page to the top, but many marketers have gotten a pretty good idea through trial and error. One thing is certain, back-links to your site with your target keyword as an anchor text is in a nutshell the one and only basis for off-page SEO.
However, that doesn’t mean you can go out there, start spamming other websites, get thousands of links and immediatelly rank as #1. No, the quality of links is the major factor to Google. For that reason you should only try to get few but quality links. Sounds difficult, but luckily there’s a good measure to tell the quality of a page in Google’s eyes, and it’s a PR. Install Google Toolbar to your browser and you will always see what PR each page has.
OK, so how many and what quality links you should get to secure your position in Google? The answer depends on the competition for the keyword, but for a competition defined in my post on keyword research, few PR 1-5 links or even less PR 6+ links should take you to page one easily. In fact, often you’ll see that a single link even with PR 1 will take you to the first page.
Now, you will hear a lot about getting as many links as possible through article marketing and social bookmarking. You will hear that from Niche Socializer too. And that is also a way to go, but keep in mind that a high PR link will beat thousands of zero or no PR links everytime. To compete for more competitive keywords and to really etablish your site so it doesn’t fall down the result pages, you will need all links you can get.
To conclude, here’s a simple plan for easy SEO:
- Do on-page SEO, make sure to build a good search listing, consider it an ad that must attract viewers’ attention.
- Submit your site to several big social bookmarking sites (Digg, Mixx, Jumtags, Propeller work good for this) to get your site indexed quickly
- Find blogs with high PR and post comment with your keyword as the name.
- Create a few blogs and other Web 2.0 pages (WordPress.com, Blogspot.com, Weebly.com, Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com), write unique content on them and link to your site, again with the correct anchor text. Submit these to bookmarking sites too, to get them indexed.
- Write unique articles and submit to high PR article directories (Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Articledashboard.com). Again, you can submit these to social bookmarking sites to get them indexed quickly.
Repear 2-5 as much and as fast as humanly possible and you will rank for competition of 100,000-150,000 pages and sometimes more.
