Free ways to drive targeted traffic to your website.
Search engine optimization is the best free way to provide targeted traffic for your business. The best paid way to generate traffic is with Google Adwords. With some work on your website, you can gain all of the benefits that paid traffic gets at no cost. If you are not familiar with Google Adwords, it is the paid system for traffic offered by Google. You bid on keywords, then when people search for those keywords, your website is placed on the search engine results page. The bids range anywhere from a single penny to over ten dollars. Google also gives your website a quality score which can affect the cost of the bids. It sounds simple enough, if you have a product or service that converts. Google Adwords can be a dangerous method of advertising for anyone inexperienced. Even though you may be spending only ten cents per click, that adds up very quickly. Remember, Google is the number one site in the world in terms of visitors per day. Your expenses can add up in a short amount of time, no matter how cheap it is per click.
The other way to get traffic to your site is by search engine optimization. This kind of traffic is called organic traffic. When you get your website placed at the top of the Google search engine results pages, there is no cost for that. You get just as many visitors to your website as you would for the paid traffic, if you optimize for the right keywords.
Selecting the right keywords to optimize for is the most important aspect of this process. You can get to the top of the search engine results pages, but if no one is searching these keywords you will not see any results for your hard work. You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help you choose the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. This is a handy tool that provides a large amount of great information. It tells you how many times each keyword is searched per month. It also tells you how much competition there is for the keywords you search for. Another helpful piece of information it gives you is related keywords. When you type in a keyword it not only gives you information for that keyword, but it gives you a list of hundreds of related keywords. For the related keywords it also provides you with information on how many times they are searched and how much competition there is for that particular keyword. This will help you think of keywords that you may not have thought of. It will also help you find keywords that are easier to get to the top of the search engine results pages in.
Once you find some high traffic keywords with low competition, it is time to start optimizing your site for these keywords. When writing articles for your page, it is important to use those keywords in the articles two to three times within the article. It is also good to have the keywords you are targeting listed in the url for your website. This alone will give you a head start on everyone else who is targeting the same keywords.
There are other mechanisms you can use to get traffic to your site for free. You can make free webpages on sites such as Squidoo and HubPages. These sites have a lot of power in the Google search engine results pages. Within a day, your site will already be indexed on google. These pages also allow you to easily list the keywords that you are looking to rank highly in. A good, search engine optimized page can easily get on the first page of search engine results. This is very common. Another benefit of making a Squidoo or HubPage is the strength of the links you put on them. When you put a link from your Squidoo or HubPage back to your regular webpage, it improves the rankings of your regular webpage in the search engines. Also, you can directly sell your products or services from the Squidoo or HubPage. Many free blog providers do not allow you to sell anything on it, but Squidoo and HubPages actually encourage you to sell on their pages.