Post by stack on Apr 29, 2008 17:36:37 GMT -5
I've had a couple messages asking for some tips, so thought I'd post a guide to getting the best free traffic there is (in my opinion) - Search Engine traffic.
First off, I don't think anyone should EVER spend money they can't afford to lose. Nothing is a guarantee in this game. This guide is all completely free, the only thing it will cost you is time.
The best free traffic source you can get is organic search traffic (ie. from google). Once you have put the work in to rank for a certain term, you will continue to come up in those search results over and over (until you take your site down, or someone else outranks you). The methods I outline below have been said in the forums before, but thought I'd put it all together for people who need a boost.
The detailed strategy outlined below will help you buildup a residual traffic stream that WILL convert for offers on your website.
Let me begin.....
1) Keyword research: In order to capitalize on search engine traffic, you need to know what people are searching every day.
To do this I go to tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php to research what people are searching on a daily basis. For example, if you type in "work at home jobs" it gives you a list of about 50-100 keywords that are similar to that search. Do this over and over with as many different searches you can think that might bring in a targeted visitor to your site (ie. "data entry jobs", "making money with surveys", "jobs for moms", etc.) This is all traffic YOU want. Now that you know what people are typing in, you can develop a strategy to capture them. (Note: Keep in mind that the keyphrases with the least number of searches will likely have the least amount of competition, and will be easier to capture). I recommend you download all these lists (there is an option to export to excel), and save them on your HD for later use.
Now that you know what people are searching, you want to show up in Google for those terms! To start off, I suggest you try and rank for terms that are not searched as frequently, as there will not be as much competition to rank to rank for. I'm sure that most of you know, Google (and the other SE's) return results based on relevant backlinks. Knowing that, let's build some relevant backlinks!
2) Link Building: Now that you have a huge list of keywords you developed from #1, you know exactly what anchor text you should be using when you try and get links to your sites. You want as many links as you can get, from quality web sites. Some link building will bring you traffic directly, others will just help increase your ranking in the search engines, and bring you traffic that way. Here is how I recommend you build links:
a) Social BookmarkingThe fastest links you can get are by including your site in social bookmarking websites. These links are indexed FAST by the SE's, and some will actually give you a decent amount of traffic. Here is a list of 100 social bookmarking websites. . www.squidoo.com/100-social-bookmarking-sites-with-google-pagerank When you are including your link, make sure to vary the anchor text you are using to link to your site with the different keyphrases/words you built from step 1. Use exact anchor text from the list you built, don't use anchor text like "stack's work at home directory" because know one is searching that, and your main goal is to rank in the search engines.
b) Article Writing (part 1): The next best links source I've found is from writing articles. There is a bunch in the forum about this, but I'll summarize my article strategy here to keep this all together. Don't know what to write about? You have a couple hundred articles to write based on the keyword list you built in step 1. Write an article around each keyphrase that you have developed above. Your should not "stuff" your article with the same keyword/phrase, but should be prevalent (ie. the most common phrase found in the article). Once you've written your article, upload it and run this tool on it to determine the density of your phrase tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ Don't spend too much time worrying about this, but if done correctly can help capture visitors searching for this topic. Try and make your article as useful and informative to the reader as possible.
Now that you have an article, what do you do with it?? This is where you can vary your strategy, but this is what I would do. Publish your article on your own website using a file name that is exactly the same as the phrase you were trying to rank for in the article. Ie. if the article was based around the keyphrase "Work at Home Jobs for Moms", make sure the file name is Work-at-Home-Jobs-for-Moms.html, make sure the <title></title> tag is "Work at home Jobs for Moms", and make sure the <H1></H1> tag is "Work at Home jobs for Moms". Link from the article to your main page, include any offers that you think might convert on the page as well. Now to get people to read this article, go through you 100 social bookmarking websites, and make a new bookmark for this article, using the keyphrase as your anchor text (in this example, the keyphrase being "Work at Home Jobs for Moms". Now you have a web page that has been individually optimized for a specific search term, and over 100 links pointing back to it with anchor text that is the same as this search term. In time you should rank for it and start getting free traffic. In the meantime, you should get traffic from the 100 social bookmarking websites.
c) Article Writing (part 2): After publishing my article on my own site, I would take my article that I published above, re-write it (usually just make a 2-300 summary of it), and publish it to ezine articles, and then blast it out to as many article directories after that as I can. In the author resource box, I would use the keyphrase that I was trying to rank for and link back to the full text article on my website. Following the example I started above I would put "...click here to read the rest of this article about work at home jobs for moms. Here is a link to over 500 article directories, with the best ones at the top that you can submit too www.seoresearcher.com/articles-directories-list-alexa-rating-ordered.htm
d) Forum posting - Find forums that are related to your site (assuming work at home) and include signature links back to your site. Depending on the traffic of the forum, this can lead to some free visitors as well
e) Blog commenting - Find good blogs that discuss work at home jobs, and post comments on the bloggers posts. When posting comment you can generally include your website, which will act as a link back to your site. Again, if you are commenting on a blog that gets alot of traffic, you might get some people clicking through to your website, especially if your comment added value.
f) General directory links - There are thousands of web directories on the net. You can get links in them for free using whatever anchor text you desire. These links do not get much weight in google, and do not provide alot of traffic. For this kind of link building, I find its generally easiest to have someone do the submitting for me (you can get 300 manual directory submissions done for about $25). Try and vary the keyphrases you use when submitting to directories, so you don't have 1000 backlinks with the exact same anchor text. These will not give you much traffic directly, but will eventually help your search engine rankings.
If you go through all of this, you should be well on your way to receiving significant amount of targeted traffic that will be interested in your offers. It takes work, and it's not overnight, but you will get results. Once you start earning some revenue from this method, you can outsource any of these functions relatively cheap (the submitting, the writing, blog commenting etc.)
Hope that helps! Interested to hear other people's opinions...
First off, I don't think anyone should EVER spend money they can't afford to lose. Nothing is a guarantee in this game. This guide is all completely free, the only thing it will cost you is time.
The best free traffic source you can get is organic search traffic (ie. from google). Once you have put the work in to rank for a certain term, you will continue to come up in those search results over and over (until you take your site down, or someone else outranks you). The methods I outline below have been said in the forums before, but thought I'd put it all together for people who need a boost.
The detailed strategy outlined below will help you buildup a residual traffic stream that WILL convert for offers on your website.
Let me begin.....
1) Keyword research: In order to capitalize on search engine traffic, you need to know what people are searching every day.
To do this I go to tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php to research what people are searching on a daily basis. For example, if you type in "work at home jobs" it gives you a list of about 50-100 keywords that are similar to that search. Do this over and over with as many different searches you can think that might bring in a targeted visitor to your site (ie. "data entry jobs", "making money with surveys", "jobs for moms", etc.) This is all traffic YOU want. Now that you know what people are typing in, you can develop a strategy to capture them. (Note: Keep in mind that the keyphrases with the least number of searches will likely have the least amount of competition, and will be easier to capture). I recommend you download all these lists (there is an option to export to excel), and save them on your HD for later use.
Now that you know what people are searching, you want to show up in Google for those terms! To start off, I suggest you try and rank for terms that are not searched as frequently, as there will not be as much competition to rank to rank for. I'm sure that most of you know, Google (and the other SE's) return results based on relevant backlinks. Knowing that, let's build some relevant backlinks!
2) Link Building: Now that you have a huge list of keywords you developed from #1, you know exactly what anchor text you should be using when you try and get links to your sites. You want as many links as you can get, from quality web sites. Some link building will bring you traffic directly, others will just help increase your ranking in the search engines, and bring you traffic that way. Here is how I recommend you build links:
a) Social BookmarkingThe fastest links you can get are by including your site in social bookmarking websites. These links are indexed FAST by the SE's, and some will actually give you a decent amount of traffic. Here is a list of 100 social bookmarking websites. . www.squidoo.com/100-social-bookmarking-sites-with-google-pagerank When you are including your link, make sure to vary the anchor text you are using to link to your site with the different keyphrases/words you built from step 1. Use exact anchor text from the list you built, don't use anchor text like "stack's work at home directory" because know one is searching that, and your main goal is to rank in the search engines.
b) Article Writing (part 1): The next best links source I've found is from writing articles. There is a bunch in the forum about this, but I'll summarize my article strategy here to keep this all together. Don't know what to write about? You have a couple hundred articles to write based on the keyword list you built in step 1. Write an article around each keyphrase that you have developed above. Your should not "stuff" your article with the same keyword/phrase, but should be prevalent (ie. the most common phrase found in the article). Once you've written your article, upload it and run this tool on it to determine the density of your phrase tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ Don't spend too much time worrying about this, but if done correctly can help capture visitors searching for this topic. Try and make your article as useful and informative to the reader as possible.
Now that you have an article, what do you do with it?? This is where you can vary your strategy, but this is what I would do. Publish your article on your own website using a file name that is exactly the same as the phrase you were trying to rank for in the article. Ie. if the article was based around the keyphrase "Work at Home Jobs for Moms", make sure the file name is Work-at-Home-Jobs-for-Moms.html, make sure the <title></title> tag is "Work at home Jobs for Moms", and make sure the <H1></H1> tag is "Work at Home jobs for Moms". Link from the article to your main page, include any offers that you think might convert on the page as well. Now to get people to read this article, go through you 100 social bookmarking websites, and make a new bookmark for this article, using the keyphrase as your anchor text (in this example, the keyphrase being "Work at Home Jobs for Moms". Now you have a web page that has been individually optimized for a specific search term, and over 100 links pointing back to it with anchor text that is the same as this search term. In time you should rank for it and start getting free traffic. In the meantime, you should get traffic from the 100 social bookmarking websites.
c) Article Writing (part 2): After publishing my article on my own site, I would take my article that I published above, re-write it (usually just make a 2-300 summary of it), and publish it to ezine articles, and then blast it out to as many article directories after that as I can. In the author resource box, I would use the keyphrase that I was trying to rank for and link back to the full text article on my website. Following the example I started above I would put "...click here to read the rest of this article about work at home jobs for moms. Here is a link to over 500 article directories, with the best ones at the top that you can submit too www.seoresearcher.com/articles-directories-list-alexa-rating-ordered.htm
d) Forum posting - Find forums that are related to your site (assuming work at home) and include signature links back to your site. Depending on the traffic of the forum, this can lead to some free visitors as well
e) Blog commenting - Find good blogs that discuss work at home jobs, and post comments on the bloggers posts. When posting comment you can generally include your website, which will act as a link back to your site. Again, if you are commenting on a blog that gets alot of traffic, you might get some people clicking through to your website, especially if your comment added value.
f) General directory links - There are thousands of web directories on the net. You can get links in them for free using whatever anchor text you desire. These links do not get much weight in google, and do not provide alot of traffic. For this kind of link building, I find its generally easiest to have someone do the submitting for me (you can get 300 manual directory submissions done for about $25). Try and vary the keyphrases you use when submitting to directories, so you don't have 1000 backlinks with the exact same anchor text. These will not give you much traffic directly, but will eventually help your search engine rankings.
If you go through all of this, you should be well on your way to receiving significant amount of targeted traffic that will be interested in your offers. It takes work, and it's not overnight, but you will get results. Once you start earning some revenue from this method, you can outsource any of these functions relatively cheap (the submitting, the writing, blog commenting etc.)
Hope that helps! Interested to hear other people's opinions...
