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 In Part 1 of our multipart series on building web traffic we focused on defining and identifying the 3 types of traffic that come to our sites. In Part 2, we examined the tools necessary to count and track the traffic coming to our sites. In Part 3, we examined how to drive direct traffic. Now we are going to focus on driving organic traffic. I use Google Analytics, however, any tool you have should be sufficient as long as you can track organic traffic.
We know that organic traffic results from people searching for particular terms and then finding and coming to our site after seeing our site returned in their search results. This traffic, as I stated in the first article, can prove to be extremely useful in helping you garner success in your web efforts if your inclusion in the search results is intentional.
One of the hardest things for a lot of bloggers to understand is how to get the information on your site indexed and included in search results. There are a number of key points you need to understand in order to achieve success with organic traffic. First, a lot of people run after Google PageRank, which is Google’s numerical value of a site, as if it’s the holy grail. It isn’t. PageRank does not equal site traffic. While a good PageRank is great, you don’t need PageRank to get traffic and having PageRank won’t get you traffic.
A lot of people are also confused about how long it takes to be included in Google’s search results. Many people think that there is a sandbox that new sites automatically go into and, once in that sandbox, Google won’t include you in search results for popular terms. This is a myth. You can get a site included in Google’s search results at any time. Your level of placement in those results depends on how popular the search terms are and the level of optimization on your site. I am going to show you how to get your site indexed and included in Google’s search in minutes. Other search engines have processes similar to the Google processes I’m going to show you.
So how do you go about getting organic traffic that actually WANTS to be on your site? First, you need to decide on exactly what your site is about. You need to be able to condense your site definition down to a few key words. For instance, if I were picking words for a site like Pure Blogic I would select, blogging, new bloggers, how to blog, how to make money blogging, how to be successful blogging, blogging information, blogging ideas, blogs about blogging, new to blogging. Those keywords need to go into your meta tags. Most modern day search engines don’t seed their search return results based on meta data, however, including that information is still useful for those that do and for monetization programs that may use this information.
After putting your keywords into your meta tags, you know need to optimize your site for the keywords you selected. You do this in a variety of ways. First, you have to focus on your content. If you are really focused on driving organic traffic, then each of your articles have to be keyword rich. Your articles need to make since to the people reading them, however, you need to include your keywords every step of the way. For instance, let’s say that you have an article about generating web traffic and generating web traffic is what your site is about. An optimized title includes as many of your keywords as possible. The article needs to be coherent, but, you need to make sure that both your title and your content are consistent with your site’s overall keywords. A lot of people say that you need to write articles for people and not search engines. I am telling you that you need to write for both. Your articles need to be keyword rich for the search engines and they need to make sense for your readers.
After you have your meta data set and your articles content and titles optimized, you need to then focus on getting your articles indexed and included in search results. This is effortless and can be done in a variety of ways. My favorite way is to make sure that my articles are included in my feeds and then ping Google. If you are using WordPress, there are tools that automatically allow you to ping Google. If you are using Joomla, you can use Weblog ping. Here is a link . If you are using WordPress, you can look in the plug ins area on the Wordpress site. You can also ping the Google service manually with your feed information. Here is the link to Google’s ping service . You can add your site and get your site indexed and information included in the search results for blogs and websites. The purpose of the Google ping service is to inform Google of continual updates to your site. Therefore, you should send pings to the service everyday. The automated plugins make it easy to do this when you post an article.
If you want your site to come up in particular search results, you need to make sure that you optimize your site for those results by following the instructions above. It isn’t difficult and it isn’t rocket science. You just have to put in the effort to make it happen. Here are some of the principal ways that you can get organic traffic to your site.
Figure out exactly what your site is about and create keywords for your site based on what your site is about.
Place your keywords in your meta tags which are in the head section of your site.
Customize your articles for the search engines by including your keywords in your article as many times as you possibly can.
Customize your article titles for search engines by including your keywords in the title as many times as you possibly can. Make sure that the title and the content make sense.
Submit your feed to the search engine’s ping service.
Use the method identified in Part 3 of this series to calculate your current average direct traffic information and then use that information to track your efforts in trying to get organic traffic. I won’t go back into the same information here, but, you can take a look at the outline in Part 3 that outlines how to measure a particular type of website traffic by clicking here .
Getting organic traffic is not hard, you just need to understand the fundamentals behind what drives your article to the first few pages of the search results. You need to understand that there are a lot of other people competing for many of the words you want to use as your keywords. Don’t be deterred by that competition. Simply understand that it exists and optimize your site to deal with it. If you put in the effort to really optimize your site, you will see good organic traffic coming to your site.
In the next part of this series we are going to examine referral traffic.
Links To Prior Articles In This Series
Part 1 - A Basic Overview Of The 3 Types Of Traffic That Come To Your Site
Part 2 - Google, Wordpress And Joomla Tools To Help You Track Traffic On Your Website
Part 3 - How To Create Campaigns To Drive Direct Traffic To Your Site And Measure Your Success
Posted By Kila Morton
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