SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the things you can do to get free traffic. The traffic is free because these visitors come to your website through a search engine. The visitor enters some keywords or keyword phrases and because of the work you do to increase your search engine optimization standing your website appears on page one.
This sounds great and you certainly would never turn down free search engine traffic. However, there are 7 things you should know before focusing on SEO as your main way of getting traffic to your website. Knowing these 7 things will help you get a better understanding of what SEO entails and whether or not it’s the best choice for your business.
First, realize getting traffic through SEO is a very long slow process. Even if you knew exactly what to do in what order it takes time to develop a high enough quality score with the search engines for your website to get found. If a searcher doesn’t see your website on the first page of their search it may as well not exist because they won’t find it.
Second, successful SEO websites are authority sites. An authority site is a website known to the search engines to be important for something. It takes a lot of high quality content to make that happen. Plus this quality content should be original content. Adding lots of content from other websites isn’t going to quickly make your website an authority website. In fact, you could get slapped by the search engines for duplicate content. A search engine slap happens when the search engine decides you’ve violated good website etiquette. They then remove your website from their search results.
Third, you need high quality links coming into your website. Trading links with other websites won’t produce good SEO results. Instead, you need high ranking authority websites in your topic area to link back to your website. If you don’t have a high ranking website yourself it’s very difficult to get those links.
Fourth, you simply must list your website with the big directories to get lots of SEO traffic. This is actually very easy to do. The problem is it’s also very costly. Expect to invest at least $200 for each of the big directories. Then expect to wait months to see any traffic as a result of registering with these directories.
Fifth, you must focus on training the search engines to identify your website with specific keywords. One of the problems beginners face is discovering the right keywords to pick. You only want the keywords and keyword phrases buyers enter when they search. You don’t want the keywords or keyword phrases people simply looking for information use. The difference between the right keywords and the wrong ones can be a single letter.
Sixth, the main objective for an SEO website is getting known by the search engines as an authority website for a specific topic or topic family. Is that the objective you want though?
Seventh, an SEO website is not necessarily a good choice for people who want to sell. There’s a big difference between getting traffic to your website and getting subscribers to your list. It may take a ton of traffic to generate a few subscribers. Your sales success depends on both the type of subscribers you get and the number of subscribers you get.
