Driving traffic to your site is the lifeblood of your online business and with all the different ways you can use to drive traffic like pay per click campaigns, banner ads and such, ultimately you want to be able to drive free traffic so your advertising costs are minimum and you get to keep all the profits to yourself.
But how do you do this?
Ranking high in the search engines. Search engines are the kings of the internet, they receive thousands of visitors everyday and at the same time they are responsible to driving traffic to thousands of other sites and these sites receive all that traffic because they rank high on the search engines. When people search for a particular term on a search engine the sites receiving the most traffic are the ones that appear in the first few pages of the search results.
Most people say the key to ranking high is to optimize your pages with the right keyword density, keywords in your title tag, keywords here, keywords there and all of these techniques work but the one with the most value to the search engines are the links pointing to your site from other sites which are known as backlinks or inbound links.
In the early days of the internet webmasters figured out the search engine's algorithms and they were ranking high for a whole different variety of terms in order to send people to porn sites. Let's say you searched for the word "Golf Clubs" you could easily end up on a porn site even though the search result said otherwise. The search engines needed to come up with a solution to this problem or their business would be in trouble.
They came up with the link popularity system where the website with the most backlinks would be consider more relevant than websites with a lower number of backlinks. Google in particular will give much more credit to websites with a lot of backlinks. So if your site does not have any other sites linking back to your site the chances of receiving free traffic from the search engines will be low.
In order to determine the amount of links pointing to your site you can simply go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites and type in your domain name in the search box, click on explore URL and they'll show you the amount of backlinks you are receiving.
Building backlinks to your site it's extremely important if you want your site to rank well in the search engine and become an authority site. Start building those valuable links today and enjoy the free traffic.
There is a fine line between proper search engine optimization, and what a search engine will consider to be spam. As we all know, not all search engine optimization methods are ethical. Search engines, such as Google, are making every effort to try to differentiate between ethical internet marketers and those who are simply taking the ?easy? way out with spam.
The definition of spam, however, has been something of a debatable topic for many search engine optimization experts. The reason that everybody is working so hard to define it is because when it comes time to search engine optimize, there is a grey area between what is spam, and what is not. What is ethical marketing, and what is not. For a word that is so commonly utilized, spam is a very difficult thing to pinpoint and around which to place boundaries. An internet marketer would not want to inadvertently have their site penalized after all of the time and effort they have put toward making the site as search engine optimized as possible.
In theory, the difference is that a ?non-spam? website that is truly meant for content, selling a product or service, and is optimized so that its content ? which has value to the reader ? is most attractive among search engines. On the other hand, a ?spam? website is created for marketing purposes only. It has no real informational value and its content is worthless except for its attempts to achieve a search engine ranking.
Such spam sites can include those that have pages copied directly from other websites that are not of public domain. They might also include pages that are simply lists of keywords, instead of articles that happen to use the keywords among their information. Another kind of spam site is one that appears to either be blank or have text or images on it, but it also has hidden text in the background that has keywords repeated over and over, or simply in lists. This is done by making the text color and the background color the same color so that it is not visible to the reader.
However, some would argue that creating a site, such as one with keywords hidden in the background, is not unethical at all. The reason they argue for its validity is that it does not try to fool the search engine in any way, and it is unobtrusive to the viewer. Computers can see the text in plain sight, it is only the human eye that does not detect it.
However, by doing this, it reduces the chances of sites that are based on legitimate information and keywording techniques. These have been carefully created to include the right words, without taking away from the information and appearance of the site. It means that the sites for whom the keywords are truly relevant have a lower chance at achieving proper search engine ranking.
To prevent such efforts, search engines have employed such techniques as penalizing web sites and web pages that include information that has been copied directly from other sites. They also penalize pages and sites that have the same word repeated too many times in its content. There are other rules that are utilized as well, but they differ from search engine to search engine.
Penalization from a search engine can mean anything from assigning a very low rank, to blocking it from being indexed altogether. Naturally, when you are a legitimate site, you will want to avoid such punishment at all costs. Therefore, when you are performing your search engine optimization, it is important that you take care not to break the ?spam? rules of the search engines. This includes one very important technique: when in doubt, err to the side of safety. It's much better to achieve rank number two instead of number one, when you risk being kicked out altogether.
It is not difficult to search engine optimize legitimately. Simply create your own original copy, and write naturally, refraining from repeating your keywords so many times that things look a little bit ?fishy?. The same thing goes for repeating the same website under a number of different domain names. Just keep yourself unique and natural, and all will work out in your favor with the search engines. There is a fine line between proper search engine optimization, and what a search engine will consider to be spam. As we all know, not all search engine optimization methods are ethical. Search engines, such as Google, are making every effort to try to differentiate between ethical internet marketers and those who are simply taking the ?easy? way out with spam.
Both Joseph Martin & Sanj Bhagta are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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