We told you how you can easily earn money from your website. The more visitors you have to your site the more you can potentially earn. Here we will tell you the basic principles on how to get lots of traffic to your site- for free!

The answer is search engines!

How search engines work
Let’s start at the beginning. How will people find you if they dont know who you are? When people don’t know a specific site that will give them what they want typically they’ll go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo and type in a few key terms to get a list of relevant sites. If you can get listed at the top of the lists for your appropriate words you’ll get tons of free traffic. That’s easier said than done. Realize that there are many other sites who are competing with you. You must find a way to get listed as high as possible on search engines.

So how does a search engine pick which sites get listed first? There are two main conditions R&R- relevance and reputation. That would make sense logically too- people are searching for the most appropriate site for their search but they dont just want any site- they want a quality site.

1. Relevance
Your site must be a match to what the searcher is looking for. In order to match this you must find out what words will users be typing to get to your site.

Pick your target words
If you own an art supply store in Brooklyn you can’t expect to be listed first when someone searches for “art” because you are not only competing with the art store down the street and across the globe but also the art history sites, art museums and 800,000,000 other art sites. Even just pursuing “art supplies” can be daunting because of the competition (43 million sites). As you build yourself up using the techniques below you may come back and pursue higher level key words. Pursuing “art supplies Brooklyn” may be just the right niche for you. It’s broad enough to get many searchs yet small enough for you to conquor.

Once you know your target key words, write specific copy to those terms dedicate specific pages to different keywords to help search engines and visitors find you. You will want to mention your keywords a few times on your page- but dont over do it lest you get penalized by the search engines. A good rule of thumb is that it should be readable to humans, who will afterall be the ones ultimately reading it. Trying to play the optimization game e.g. putting the keywords 20 times but not 21 can be dangerous as it can help you on some search engines but get you penalized on others. Further as search engines adjust their algorythms it will hurt you there too. So remember keep it simple and informative.

2. Reputation
A site’s repution will boost its ranking especially when the content matches well. The search engine logic is that readers would prefer to gain their information about an upcoming election from The New York Times as opposed to a site out of someone’s garage. Having a good looking site won’t enhance your reputation with search engines (it will with users so you should do it anyway). Writing clever copy wont help your reputation with search engines- it can actually hurt see above. Your reputation is simply based on how many other sites think that you are important. Sites “vote” for other sites by linking to them. The more relevant the site (e.g. an art site in the example above) the better the vote.

As you can see it’s to your advantage to try to get as many links to your site as possible. Think about suppliers, vendors, clients and trade groups. Each of them may be willing to link to your site. But mostly write quality content so sites will want to like to your site on their own.

I may have simplified many aspects of the complex formulas that search engines use to determine their results but using these principles you’ll get a great start to getting lots of free traffic.