A common mistake that new small and independent business owners make is to create a website and then think of ways to get guaranteed web traffic to it. While that is an intuitive thought, you should really first put some analysis into the content on your site before you even begin directing traffic to your website.The reason for this is that SEO (search Engine Optimization) will be an important way for you to gain organic traffic, and if you do it the right way, you can start seeing visitors right away.
At its most basic, SEO is comprised of two elements: relevant keywords and backlinks or, as some people refer to them, incoming links. Before you develop your website, you will need to have an idea of the keywords that you want to target and make sure that they are included your website’s content.
Step 1 – Keyword Strategy
It’s generally recommended that when you first start out, you should go for the lower-search volume keyword phrases, rather than the more competitive general terms.
For example, if your business focuses on an areas within management consulting, you might want to identify a more specific keyword phrase like “leadership training” or even more narrow, like “strategy leadership training”. The keywords that you will include on your website should be the exact terms that people are looking for when they do a search online. And you can find these keywords very easily by using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool which is completely free of charge. This tool gives you keywords that are relevant to your business and also provides information about how competitive the keywords are, how often they are searched for, and how much people are bidding on them for PPC ads.
You want to locate the lower-searched terms that have less competition. Identify three to five that you can use early on in your website or blog. In general, each keyword should be used once in some sort of important position in your site or on your blog (like the title or page header), in the first five words of any description following the title or heading), and in the last sentence of the content. In the body of your content, it should be used no more than three percent of the time. Before you start looking for backlinks, you want to have at least five articles (of about 500 words) on your blog or at least five pages of your website.
Step 2 – Backlinks
Once you have determined your keyword strategy, you can begin to execute your traffic generation tactics by working on obtaining backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks from other websites to your website. Backlink Building is a technique to get high quality backlinks to your web site from high PR websites in your area of interest as a way to increase PageRank. Backlinks are required so that when people search for your product using keywords or key phrases they will find them because the search engines such as Google and Yahoo have seen your backlink and index your site in their database.
Backlink building is usually targeted to blog pages, social bookmarks, forums, and others as long as they have high page ranks. You can do this by submitting articles about your business to article directories, Squiddoo, HubPages and linking them back to your website. Or you can comment on blogs and forums that are related to your industry, and include your link in your comments.
These are just a few ways that you can get backlinks to your site. The more quality backlinks you have, the better the search engines “like” you, the higher you will be ranked in search engine results, and the more guaranteed web traffic you will obtain. Just remember, that backlink building should be a continuous procedure that has to be carried out gradually. Although it is not always an easy thing to do, there are ways that you can make backlink building easy and fast for your website or business, even if your site is brand new.