Search Marketing - The Real Scoop on Getting Good Search Engine Rankings

Everyone who has a website or a blog wants more traffic. Some people try paying for traffic by either buying from bulk traffic sources or using pay per click services like Google AdWords. However, the best and most targeted traffic is free and comes from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Buying bulk traffic is almost never a good idea and pay per click can be very expensive and a huge gamble.

How to Get Free Traffic

So, how do you get lots of free traffic from the search engines? You need to do a little search marketing. There are basically two types of search marketing or search engine optimization. There are a number of things you can do to optimize the pages of your website and a more difficult factor which is getting quality links from other websites.

On-Site Optimization

The things that you can do to your own site are fairly straightforward and are all centered around the proper use of keyword phrases. Before you do anything else you want to determine the keyword phrases that you wish to target. These are defined by what people will type into the search engine to find your site. To determine the proper keywords you need to examine your site and determine what the most important pages are about. You then want to pick keyword phrases that people would use in search and that are relevant to your site.

Keywords

The best way to determine if the keywords you chose are actually used by people in the search is to use the free Google AdWords keyword tool. You can use this free tool even if you don't have a Google AdWords account. When you use the keyword tool you will want to test your keywords to see how often they are actually used. You will also want to do a Google search putting each of your keyword phrases in quotes. Take a look at how many search results come up. If there are tens of thousands of results your keyword phrase may be too competitive to conquer.

Keyword Density

After you've picked your keywords you will want to check the pages on your website to make sure those keyword phrases are used. You will choose one main keyword phrase per page. Your main keyword phrase should appear at least once in the title of your page. Depending on the amount of text on your pages several times within that text. A good keyword density to shoot for is around 3 percent. Don't over do it and stuff your pages with keywords.

Links

There are a number of other things you can do to your pages but by far the most impact will come from quality links to the pages. Unfortunately, getting quality links is easier said than done. A quality link will actually have your keyword phrase in the link text. The link will be more effective if it appears in the text of a page and that text is relevant to the keywords you're targeting. You can try exchanging links with other webmasters but that is very time-consuming and not terribly effective. When you exchange links they are known as reciprocal links and the search engines are not terribly impressed by reciprocal links.

One-Way Links

What you really want are one-way links from quality sites that use your keywords in the text and that point to the exact pages that are optimized for those keywords. As you might expect these kind of links are not easy to come by. However if you really want your website to be successful you need lots of these quality links in addition to the proper user of keywords on your pages.