by William Lund
There are no secrets to getting plenty of free search engine traffic. Provide what people are searching for in the form of high quality content, and lots of it. The old saying that content is king is still true. You do need high quality content, and content that people are searching for. Fortunately there are ways to find out what it is people are searching for, and we can briefly examine them.

After you’ve chosen a topic, hopefully a topic that a lot of people are interested in, you will need to find out exactly what key words and key word phrases people use when searching for information about your topic. This can be done with one of several keyword tools that are available online. By using the keyword tools you can find out what groups of words are really used by searchers, and which ones are wastes of time. If no one searches for a phrase, then ranking number one on Google for that phrase won’t do you a bit of good. The keyword research tools provide you with all kinds of ways of finding out what key words to optimize for and they even tell you how hard it will be to achieve a high ranking in the search engines with a particular word or phrase.

Before we get any further I would like to point out that the goal of the search engines is to find the most relevant results of the search for the HUMAN doing the search. The search engines are pretty smart, and getting smarter all the time. They are looking for high quality content, but even the best search engine software cannot determine easily whether content is of high quality nor not. However there are clues and things the search engines can base decisions about the quality of the content on, both on the page and off.

For instance, the engines can determine that the text has a large number of spelling errors, something you would not expect to find with great content. Even grammar and punctuation can be taken into consideration.

Search engines cannot read images. To get the attention of the engines you need text, and lots of it. I like to use 500 to 800 words per web page. The more pages the better. Each page should be optimized for two or three keyword phrases. It’s very important to write for humans, not for search engines…they can tell the difference. Make sure you run your work through a spell checker, and better yet, a word processor that will check your grammar as well. And don’t forget to check the punctuation. If, in the eyes of the search engines, two sites have nearly identical quality scores and one has poor grammar or punctuation and the other doesn’t, then guess who gets the higher ranking.

Keep it simple! I’m sure there are a lot of great sites with great content and high rankings that are not simple. But unless you are into that stuff there is no need. Chances are a human searching for information about a topic would prefer a simple site that is easy to navigate, easy to read, and easy to locate the desired information on, than a fancy sight with lots of graphics and or flash etc.

Use a logical linking scheme for your site’s internal links. The engines will be examining your links for clues about which pages are the most important and what your topic is. They must also be able to follow the links if you want your pages listed in the search engine results. Put some of your keywords in the link text, and in the text surrounding the link. But don’t get crazy, just a light sprinkling of key word phrases will do the trick.

Avoid using single-word keywords. Not only is it easier to get good rankings for multiple word keyword phrases, the traffic you get will be more tightly targeted and you should therefore get more sales or signups or whatever the goal of your site is.

Make use of the bold and heading tags to present a hierarchy of the importance of your content to the engines.

Avoid cluttering up your pages with advertisements and links. Page clutter is something the engines can determine. They can look at the ratio of ad links to text, total number of links, graphics placements, what is above the fold on a page, and lots more. This is another reason to keep your pages and navigation clean and simple. Oh yeah, humans like clean and simple too.

Include a few images and work some keywords into the image alt tags. Some of my sites get a surprising amount of traffic from Google’s image search. So put text in the alt image tag that is related to the picture, perhaps get it into the file name for the image, and in some nearby text, which can help Google figure out what the image is about.

Once you have your high quality content in place with your simple and straight forward site navigation worked out, it’s time to look at what you can do to obtain some good links to your site from other quality sites. After all, there could be thousands of pages of pretty much identical information about any given topic online, and how is a search engine to figure out which is the best? One way is to evaluate the quantity and quality of incoming links to your site from other sites.

High quality content will attract some links, but if you actively seek out links from other quality sites you can speed things up. Avoid linking with large numbers of sites in a short amount of time, like what happens when you join a link farm. Google prefers to see a slow steady increase in links as though it were a natural human endeavor. If a huge number of links pops up overnight Google doesn’t count them as very important. The same is true if huge numbers of links have identical link text. Google will take note and reduce their value.

The more pages you have, the better your chances of being included in the search results from those billions of daily searches, and thus the more traffic you will receive. It’s all just a numbers game.

Once you have all of that stuff in place, then you have to wait. Typically with a new site, you may get a little initial activity through Google for a few weeks, then you will drop off the map for up to a year with Google. That is what is known as being in Google’s sand box. After a year or so your site will start being listed in the search results and things will start looking up.

Get online and investigate those keyword tools so you can choose a great niche topic for your next website.

William Lund has been a successful webmaster since 1998. Learn more about SEO, keyword issues, linking, and making money online Free SEO and Marketing InformationFor more information about making money online visit Mr. Lund’s blog at Pondering Everything

Article Source: Get Tons of Free Organic Google Traffic!