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.

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. After getting the traffic you just need to convert it into subscribers and customers . . . but that’s the easy part. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.

Here are some tips for generating website visitors:

Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:

• Web 2.0 Sites
• Article Marketing
• Video Sites

And here’s how to use each method…

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. The exciting thing about Web 2.0 sites is that you get to add your own content and it becomes part of these sites. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. The benefit of this to you is that your content is now considered as part of these 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. The direct traffic from the Web 2.0 sites themselves is only part of the benefit. How to generate web 2.0 traffic is something we’ve only scratched the surface on. I don’t want to be exhaustive – I want to give you an overview of all the methods…

Article Websites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article sites are in essence web 2.0 websites. Just like web 2.0 sites, article websites allow you to upload your own content – as articles. And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. And the hidden benefit here is that your reach grows as other people take your articles and put them on their blogs and sites. 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. Here are a couple article marketing traffic tips:

• Figure out what keywords you want to go after
• Tailor the content of your article for the keywords
• Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Here to we’re really looking at a web 2.0 sub-category. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. And in addition to this, because Google and the others love video so much, you can get listed for highly competitive keywords much more easily.

Here are just a few video marketing tips:

• Get a YouTube account
• Make your profile uncluttered by turning off all the modules
• Use the tags in your profile to enter the keywords you want to rank for
• Make sure to include in your profile a link to your site
• Upload at least 1 video
• Include your keywords in the title, description and tags

In closing…

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

But, first…

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. Which means you need to put some thought into the keywords you’re targeting.

A couple things to keep in mind when doing keyword research:

• How competitive are the keywords you’re going after? This involves doing some competitive analysis to determine the ease of entry for each keyword
• What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? Certain keywords are good for generating a lot of visitors who don’t buy anything. What you want is buyers!
• What about affiliates? If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. This means that some of your traffic focus should be on getting affiliates to your site.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. What I recommend is using website traffic software to save the time of doing it yourself and the money of hiring someone else. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

Once you know your keywords…

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

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Most people overlook the power of Surveys!
• “Traffic Traps”
• Video Websites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. They benefit by getting free content for their site and you get a link to your site under the survey. This allows you to get free website traffic from other people’s sites! This is a sneaky little idea that most people never even think of. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Help” Websites

Sites like Yahoo! Answers allow users to ask and answer each others’ questions. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. So, if you’re smart, you’ll use website traffic software to do it all for you. 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.

Even if you don’t think you can make a good video. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already 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…

It’s not that hard to get traffic to your websites. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. You can even use software to automate most of what we’ve talked about.

Don’t waste any more time:

• Keyword research first is key
• Then create some surveys born to go viral
• Make sure to use the “answer” sites
• And don’t forget about video