Traffic Generation 101

by James Farias

Getting Traffic to Your Website

I'm going to share some internet marketing techniques with you that will drive traffic to any website you own, but first it's important to understand how traffic works. This article will not go into minute details (that's for upcoming articles and posts). Instead, you are about to be shown a quick overview of how traffic works and how you can get your share.

So You Have a Website…What Now?

Just because you put up a website doesn't mean that Google (or any other search engine for that matter) is going to start sending you traffic. In fact, search engines doesn't SEND traffic anywhere. The search engines simply display a listing of sites ranked by what the user enters into that particular search engine's search box. The user then has to actively click on your site's link to visit your site. That being the case, the key here is to show up in the search engine's rankings on page one or page two (where people will actually see it) while also ensuring that the user wants to click on the search result for your site.

Why Is Ranking Important?

If you have a website that is promoting a product or service, then there is a good chance that you are competing with thousands (if not millions) of other pages on the internet promoting the same thing. Over 90% of all search engine users never go to page 2 of search engine results. That's why it vital to get onto page 1 of search engine rankings. That is why you need to force your site's pages to rank higher than the pages of your competitors.

How Does Google Determine How It Will Rank Your Site

While the actual algorithms that Google uses for site rankings is secret, there are many things that have been discovered. What Google looks for when ranking your site is of course relativity. If your page is offering instructions on how to assemble wedding gift baskets, then Google will index your page as a page on how to assemble wedding gift baskets. That part is simple. It won't show up (or shouldn't show up) for pages on how to repair a computer. The problem comes in the fact that you will be competing with thousands of other pages that offer similar information.

So you need to do things to your site to leap frog over those other pages and come out on top. The biggest thing that Google looks for when deciding how to rank similar pages is popularity. In other words, how many other sites are linking to your site? Google does this because they feel that, just as our country is run as a Democracy where a single candidate gets elected into office by having the most votes, the people should also decide which sites are most relevant within a given niche. In Google's eyes, if another site is willing to post a link to your site, then you must have a quality site and deserved to be ranked higher. Getting enough links (or votes) will play very heavily when Google decides where to rank you. Links to your site from other sites are called "Backlinks".

Now here's the catch… you can have 20 links to your site and still get beat out by a site that only has 10. The reason is this… Google gives "extra credit" to links that come from quality sites or sites similar to yours.

So Where Do You Get Quality Backlinks That Drive Traffic?

So now that we know some basics of what Google wants, we will start to develop a traffic plan that will help us to start ranking higher on Google's search engine. Below I provide a traffic blueprint we are going to use to get those valuable backlinks. Don't worry if it seems overwhelming. I'm going to give you a blueprint that automates most of it, and here's the good news, in addition to getting valuable backlinks from the sources below, you will also be getting additional targeted traffic!

Step-by-Step Traffic Blueprint

The following is the blueprint that I use to create a massive amount of free traffic for my websites. Here's why it works: If you actually follow through with all of these steps, you will not only create hundreds of links back to your website, but you will also get tons of traffic to your site as well. You see this plan will give you more backlinks then 99% of all similar websites. In other words, you will be a top 1% websites within your niche when it comes to getting traffic to your site.

What Google looks for when it looks for websites to rank high is content lots and lots of relevant content. This is because when people visit search engines, that is what they are looking for. Content comes in many forms...it can be articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc. What you will need to focus on is building an accumulation of content and flooding the internet with our content. One thing to keep in mind when generating your content is that what will make your site rank higher is having an abundance of original content. So if you simply cut and paste content from other websites you will most likely be beat out by the site that already has that content. So you will want to make sure to focus on creating and developing original content.

Steps to flooding the internet with your original content:

1. Brainstorm ideas for an article. To come up with ideas for an article you can start by visit websites and blogs that are similar to yours. As you come across blogs, you should write a comment to their blog posts with a link back to your site whenever possible. For a detailed breakdown of how you can generate the necessary content you can see our article Creating Unique Blog Content.
2. Write an article. Use Microsoft Word or your favorite word processor and save it to your hard drive. This step is important as many people have a tendency to write straight to their blogs editor. the reason for saving this to your hard drive is that you will be using it again and again.
3. Turn your article into a blog post. Pretty self-explanatory...simply post your article to the WordPress blog on your website.
4. Distribute your blog post via social media marketing. Submit your blog post to all the major social bookmarking sites such as FaceBook, Digg, Reddit & Mixx.
5. Submit to Twitter. Generate a short Twitter blurb letting all of your follower know about your new blog article.
6. Create a Squidoo Lens. You can take your article and very quickly create a Squidoo Lens. Google loves Squidoo!
7. Post your article onto Hosted Blogs. Copy and paste the same (or slightly rewritten article onto several hosted blogs that you have created such Blogger, BlogSpot, WordPress.org.
8. Submit to article directory sites. You can publish the same article to article directory sites that get indexed by Google. A couple of good examples of these types of sites would be EzineArticles.com and GoArtilces.com
9. Send out press releases. There are many free online press release submission sites. You can rewrite your article slightly and blast it out as a press release.
10. Post parts of the article onto relevant forums. You can take portions of the article and put it out there on forums. When using forums don't spam, just add content that is relevant to an ongoing discussion or create a new discussion of your own utilizing a portion of your article and have a link to your site in your profile's signature.
11. Create a PodCast. Use the article and record it as an .mp3 audio file so that you can publish it as a podcast. You can do this with an inexpensive microphone that you can pick up from just about any retail or online store and the free open source audio recording and editing software Audacity. Best of all it only takes minutes to do.
12. Create a Video from the Podcast. Create a slide show utilizing free images you find on the web and combine it with the .mp3 audio file you created to produce a video utilizing the free screen recording software solution CamStudio. Upload the video to video sharing sites such as YouTube.

If you follow these internet marketing techniques you WILL see a dramatic increase in traffic to your site over time. The problem that plagues so many internet marketers is that they spend a little time generating and promoting content and when they don't see immediate results they give up. If you are persistent in your efforts and consistent in your methodologies your hard work will pay off in an unending supply of natural search engine traffic.

About the Author

To learn more about internet marketing and how you can dominate your niche visitIMBusinessJournal.com.