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January 16, 2007
More Website Traffic = More Money
No matter what revenue model your website idea falls under, the most important thing you need is traffic. No traffic equals no money, it’s as simple as that. So how do you build traffic to your website? Unfortunately, unless you are flush with venture capital money and can afford to buy targeted web ads all over the Internet, you will need to develop traffic to your website organically.
Getting Organic Website Traffic
The three search engine websites Google, Yahoo, and MSN offer the best deal in the history of advertising. People search for what your site is about and your listing is presented to millions of people absolutely free. Unfortunately, unless you are in the top ten for your “money” keyword phrases, being listed in the search engine isn’t going to help much. Several studies have shown that searchers rarely go beyond the first ten links that come up in their web searches.
Your first step is to write a list of 5 keyword phrases you would like to get ranked in the top 10 and focus your effort on those phrases. If you get all 5 words in the top 10, you will no doubt rank for hundreds of other related keyword phrases. Your main keyword phases should all be 2 or 3 words long. Only the highest power websites will ever rank for a one-word search so your effort is best spent on multiple keyword phases that visitors would potentially use to find your website.
So how does a search engine determine the top ten websites that it will list? If you search Google for the phrase “Website Ideas” you will see at the top right of the search result page that Google has 150 million or so sites that are in their database for the phrase “website ideas”.
This means that sites in the top 10 for this keyword phrase are considered to be a better match than 99.9999999 % of all websites in Google’s database – so if you think about it, getting ranked at all is quite an accomplishment. To get in the top 10, you really need to know what you are doing.
Anyway, so how do you get your website ranked in the top 10? The search engines have some fairly complex algorithms (way to complex to describe in detail here) so I’ll give you the “Big Seven” components of how search engines rank websites:
1.) Inbound Links
a. Anchor text of inbound links
b. Quality of inbound links
2.) Age of the website
3.) Title of the webpage
4.) Headings of your pages
5.) Meta descriptions of your website pages.
6.) How many times the keyword is mentioned on your site
7.) Amount of traffic that clicks on your site when you come up in a search
In future posts, I will go into detail on each of the “Big Seven” search engine algorithm components, and what you need to do to take advantage of them.
In the meantime, if you want some heavy reading, here is a link to Google’s Search Engine Patent.
Posted by Idea Man at January 16, 2007 12:25 PM