If you have ever owned or operated a website with a hope of being able to make money online you know the hardest part is getting traffic to your website. Personally the best way I have found to get targeted traffic to any web presence is ranking it well in the major search engines. To rank well in the major search engines you will need to become familiar with search engine optimization. There are two types of search engine optimization. Onsite SEO is the process of placing the keywords you would like to rank well for on priority areas of your website. Offsite SEO is all the work you do offsite which is mainly building keyword anchored links towards your website. Before I move on it is important to note that everything in this article is from my observations rather than fact. No one but Google engineers know everything about Google and they change how they rank websites frequently. This means that even if you figure out how to rank well in Google today they may change algorithm factors and you may not rank well tomorrow.
The most important aspect of SEO is understanding what search engines want. They want their visitors to find the most relevant and helpful websites possible. This means that if you sacrifice the readability, usability, or look of your website for SEO purposes then you are working against your own goals. Always put the visitor first and you will be rewarded both by visitor referrals and search engine position. When you begin optimization you will need to know the keywords you would like to rank well for. To pick these go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool and type in a couple of keywords. This tool will bring up a list of 100 keywords and the keyword you entered. The tool will also tell you the traffic of all the keywords it lists. Pick a few keywords you want to rank well for. I highly recommend you pick the keywords which have the most traffic.
Now that you have chosen your keywords it is time to place them on the site in the positions which mean the most to Google. The first and most important is the URL. Place your most important keyword in the URL and since this is what Google will look at first. You should also place the keywords in headings and in the first few sentences of your content. Remember not to repeat the keywords over and over making your site impossible to read. Now that you have your site set up to start getting free web traffic the next is building links. You will want to place the keywords between the anchor tags of every link you build. The two places that are great to build keyword anchored text links are free web directories and article directories. For a list of free web directories visit directorycritic.com and for a list of article directories search Google for “list of article directories”.
When you start getting traffic from Google and the other major search engines it will be important to monetize. Affiliate marketing is a great monetization technique and my personal favorite affiliate programs are the paid to take surveys websites.
