For anyone who has ever experienced the enjoyment of watching traffic flood into their website and fill your inbox up with list signups and sales and then finds out that it was the result of a website or page getting top listing in the search engines – I’m with you, it’s an incredible feeling!
I have thousands and thousands of pages of content all over the internet on 3 major niche markets – some of them have been around for more than 5-years, others I’ve just added in the last few days.
My website statistics show substantial traffic coming from hundreds of different articles, blog postings, videos, affiliate sites and webpages – that’s just the really substantial traffic, there are thousands of other pages that each bring in a dozen or fewer visitors each day…the longer tail content pages.
Over the last few years I’ve had several pages reach the number one spot and number one page of Google, Yahoo and MSN search resulting in some pretty incredible spikes in free search engine traffic. I no longer pay for advertising to my established sites – only paid advertising I do is less than $10/day testing various headlines, ads, and new markets and websites for myself and my clients.
We go through many examples of how to optimize your sites for SEO within InfoMarketer’sZone, here are some of the most important methods:
1. Your headline and article/page title
2. Your keyword distribution – repeated somewhere around 5-6 times in a 500-700 word article seems like the sweet spot – in context of course
3. Video certainly helps these days – (See "Getting More Traffic With Content")
4. Blog postings so long as they are made from an optimized blog
5. Time – you can’t control this one other than to get cracking and develop content now. In some cases a month or two is all it needs to cure, in other cases I’ve had articles reach the top only after a year or more
6. External links. I admit I don’t pursue external links very aggressively – mostly I submit content to authority sites like article directories like ezinearticles and press release directories as well as social networking sites (See "Why Social Networks Matter)
There’s another technique that I’ve used for years – internal linking. At first blush you may ask what benefit internal linking has on your overall search engine optimization effort?
No – it doesn’t give you the same bump as having credible, quality external backlinks, but over time, you will find that certain content pages or sites – for example your blog – may gain extra search engine ranking that you can then strategically link through to other pages on your site (such as your sales page, an affiliate landing page or opt-in page) so it gets some of the benefit shared from your higher ranked pages.
If you think about this, it makes a great deal of sense, and it’s quite natural in terms of your best content pages being most popular with Google and the other SE’s with expected, natural links back to "action" pages as appropriate within your content.
Here’s a more detailed explanation on using internal links – including some examples…oh, by the way, perhaps you noticed some of my internal links throughout this blog posting?
