Getting your clients and customers and potential clients and customers to your website is an integral part of just about every business goal. Whether large, small or a single person working from home, businesses want traffic at their websites. They want their website visitors on their lists so they can market services and products to them.
I work with several small businesses, often times at a local level. Just a couple of years ago some of them were not convinced that their business depended a great deal upon their internet presence. Today they acknowledge that getting on the first page when someone looks up Google for their product or service is very important to them.
There are basically four ways to get traffic to your website;
1. Traffic from search engines such as Google. This is known as search engine optimization or SEO.
2. Traffic from paid search ads such as the pay-per-click text ads that appear on Google.
3. Traffic from other advertising such as ads from newsletters, affiliate programs, presentations, networking referrals, and such.
4. Traffic from former visitors that the business has managed to maintain contact with by newsletter, membership sites, blogs, and coupons.
I believe the most basic, the most important and probably the least expensive way to bring traffic to your website is through Search Engine Traffic. In this approach you bring traffic to your website through the natural or organic search results on Google, Yahoo or Bing. To get traffic to your site for the search words or keywords that are important to your service or product, you need to do what is called Search Engine Optimization.
Fortunately, this is something that you, the average small business owner or professional can do for ourselves. Granted, it takes time and you have to know what you are doing, but it does not take a geeky mentality and it does not take wads of money.
SEO has two important parts:
1. Webpage organization and
2. Getting links back to your website
Webpage organization begins with keyword research. These may be the same keywords others are using for their Pay Per Click advertising, But instead of looking for hundreds of keywords and key phrases as you would in Pay Per Click advertising you are looking for the top 10 words and sometimes only the top 3 or 4.
I am a writer so it should come as no surprise when I say I LOVE WORDS. I love some words because of the way they sound, others because of their usage and still others because they are so descriptive.
You have probably been taught that words are powerful. NOT TRUE. Using the right word and using it the right way is what makes a word powerful. Sometimes it is only a matter of WHO is using the word
If you work with the right words you will get traffic no matter who you are. I was using the concept of keywords for promotional material for a nonprofit long before the search engines were doing their thing on the web. Using keywords is not a new concept. Copywriters have been using them for years and understand their importance.
At the basic level, keywords do not have to do a lot with SEO. They are more about you knowing everything there is to know about your market: what makes your market tick? become angry? spend money? or quit? Which words are going to attract their attention?
Keyword research may sound intimidating if this is new to you. In fact it is rather basic. Keyword research tools like Keyword Tracker, Keyword Discovery, and Word Tracker estimate the number of times people search for different phrases. For example, hundreds of thousand of people search for the word blogging each month. Tens of thousands may attach a phrase to the word such as blogging for travel. That does not mean you will get tens of thousands to your website when you use specific keywords on your website traffic, but if you market that post I can assure you will get much more than your ordinary traffic to your website.
I invite you to learn more about how you can create website traffic for search engines by writing articles with keywords that point to your website. Ruthan Brodsky is a copywriter and content marketer who helps professionals and small business use content to promote their business. Claim your free report on using articles to promote your business at http://ruthanbrodsky.com/free-report
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