Creating a website is only the first step to world domination, you need to promote it so that people can know about it. What if you could get free and targeted traffic? (Note that "targeted" is important here. You do not want to attract anyone on your website, you want to attract people who are likely to be interested by it.)
Why get traffic from Google?
Search is usually the first action on internet for most users (including your potential clients) and Google is getting most of these searches, Bing slowly catching up.
How can you benefit from this traffic?
There are mainly two ways to get traffic from Google, one is from doing paid ads via Google Adwords and the other one is to appear in the search results when someone enters a specific keyword.
Google Adwords may help your site at the on-set of your business, but if not handled properly, this could prove to be costly and even deadly for your budget.
As opposed to Adwords, organic traffic (coming from search results) is free but it is a continuous process that bears its fruits on the longer term.
Google looks at certain factors to determine which websites to display for a given keyword. The practice of influencing Google to rank higher for a specific keyword is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
So where to start with SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is divided into two parts: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.
On-page Optimization
Google bots (a.k.a. Google search engine spiders) will go through the entire code of your website to pull out the essential parts. If your website in not search engine friendly, then Google will not understand what your content is about and won't associate it with the correct keywords.
Let's say that you want to rank in Google for the keyword "sydney accountant".
When you open your website in an internet browser, the title of the window should contain this keyword. Also, the main title of your page should contain the keyword so that it is clear for Google and your visitor what the website is about.
Google also looks at the alternative text associated with the images of your website, and the loading time of your pages.
Some website management systems like WordPress or Drupal make it fairly easy to do on-page SEO.
Off-page Optimization
To know if a page contains good content, Google looks at the number of other websites that link to that specific websites and the quality of these websites. If you get linked by spammy websites only, it will consider your website spammy but if reputable websites link to your article, then Google will think that you are worth showing in the search results.
Off-page optimization consists mainly of link building.
Below are some ideas on where to get links for your site:
- Submit your site to reputable directories (DMOZ and Yahoo!)
- Comment on related blogs and include a link to your website. Be careful: don't be spammy, always contribute to the discussion otherwise refrain to comment.
- Post in related forums and add your link in your signature.
- Submit some articles to sites such as http://ezinearticles.com/. This is called article marketing.
- Create some press releases and submit them to sites such as 1888pressrelease.com. Note that not all press release submission sites are free.
- Create mini-blogs focusing on a specific topic related to your niche and link back to your main website. You can use free blogs such as blogspot or squidoo.
