IM Affiliate Tip - SEO: Get Indexed, Get Ranked, Get Traffic

So, you have decided upon a niche market, picked a product to promote, and created your landing page. Now what? You need to perform SEO or search engine optimization. What is search engine optimization? Search Engine Optimization is a measure of how well Google and other search engines think your website matches the search terms people are typing into their search boxes. It's a complex formula that only people working for Google know exactly. However, there are several things that we know for sure.

All marketers know that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online, and the best kind of traffic is free traffic. Now, where's the best place to get free traffic? Google and other search engines. How does free search engine traffic work?

You have participated in this process every time you've performed a search. You went online, entered the words you were interested in, and then you clicked on one of the pages that is displayed. That website owner has just enjoyed the benefit of free traffic. So the real question is how do you get that free traffic. When you do a search you probably only visit a link or two from the first page of results. Most likely you don't even scroll down to the bottom of that page. The truth is that this first page of results receives the bulk of all the clicks, and believe it or not, the first three results receive anywhere from sixty to seventy-five per cent of the traffic. This means that to get any real traffic you need to be on the first page in Google, and that means you need to be "ranked" in the top 10 by Google. This bring us to search engine optimization, a fancy name for getting indexed, getting ranked, and getting traffic.

Getting indexed

Before you can do anything with your website, Google has to know that it exists. This is known as being "indexed." What this means is that Google visits your site and records information about it in their database. Google needs to actually find your site in order to index it. Links from other sites are the easiest way to accomplish this because Google already knows about these sites, and it will follow the new links to you. Using your Twitter and Facebook updates will get quick links to your site. These sites are indexed multiple times every day, so your new link will get indexed very quickly. You can also make use of "pinging" sites to draw attention to your site.

Gaining ranking

After getting indexed, you need to work on your search engine ranking. Due to the massive size of the Google database - literally billions of pages - just getting indexed doesn't do much for you. There are three components of gaining ranking:

* Content
* Links
* Activity

SEO content

This is the SEO work you do on your page. It's critical that your page content is consistent with the keyword phrases you're targeting. The topic of this article is clearly SEO. One reason Google knows this is because the words search engine optimization appear inside it. And another way this is determined is by the other related phrases like traffic generation that are also in the article. You also need to make sure the title tags, outbound links and the domain itself match the topic of the page. These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.

Links for SEO

Let's talk about your links. This includes both your inbound and out bound links. Your inbound are the most important. You want to have more coming in than going out, and the more inbound links the better. You also want quality inbound links. A quality link is one that comes from a site that Google considers to be an authority site. A very easy way to get a lot of links to your site is through article marketing, especially articles from EzineArticles.com, because that is an authority site.To accomplish this you start by writing an article that targets the keywords you're after. Then you have to create multiple versions of this article and post these unique versions to lots of other websites that accept articles. The more you do, the better.

Increasing your activity

Finally, we know that Google gives you credit for the activity on your site. You can't just put up a page and leave it alone and expect it to rank well. Google expects you to be updating your site regularly. One way to keep adding new content is through RSS feeds, but the best way is with active discussions on your page itself. To get comments from others, you need to get others to visit your site. An easy way to do this is from forums. Set up forum profiles with the ones related to your website. Visit often and make quality posts. No spamming, please. Always include a link back to your site. This generates even more backlinks for you, and it also gets people to your web page.

In conclusion, each step listed above is critical. Writing multiple versions of the same article, creating profiles on a ton of forums, and posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time. Unfortunately, the bad news is that you probably won't do it. Fortunately, there is good news. If you have a budget that allows you to invest in some software you can get a program to do all the grunt work for you. So, use your time wisely and automate the tedious tasks. Otherwise, you won't do it at all. By taking these steps, you practically ensure you'll get free traffic from Google.