No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And nothing beats free traffic. And where’s the best place to get free traffic? Google and other search engines.

How do we get free traffic from Google?

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. And click one of the links that shows up. Well, the link you clicked on just send free traffic to that website owner. What need to figure out is how to get you free traffic.

Most people only click results from the first couple pages. In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic. And believe it or not, the first 3 results receive over 70% of the traffic.

This means that to get any real traffic you need to be on the first page in Google. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. 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. 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 called getting “indexed.” What this means is that Google visits your site and records information about it in their database.

In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. 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. 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.

The 3 factors in getting ranked:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

SEO 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. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. One way Google figures this out is from the fact that it contains the term SEO. And another way this is determined is by the other related phrases like traffic generation that are also in the article.

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. You want to make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links. The more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be.

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. And post unique versions to lots of websites that accept articles. The more sites you can do this for, the more links you’ll get back.

Getting activity

The last thing we know for sure is that Google likes to see active sites. Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time. So you need to update your pages often. You can do this with RSS feeds and news posts.

But the best way is with active discussions on your page itself. To get comments from others, you need to get others to visit your site. One simple method for doing this is to use forums.

Create profiles on lots of forums about your site’s topic. And post their often. Always include a link back to your site. This will get your more inbound links. And it also gets people to your web page.

Conclusion

It’s important that you do everything listed here. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. Setting up tons of profiles on forums. And posting your content all over the web is time consuming. And you’re already too busy, so you mostly likely will never do any of it.

However, rank builder software exists. And it automates everything we’ve just talked about. So the best thing you can do is to automate this process. This way you’ll actually do it. And not doing it means you will never get free traffic from Google.