Google Secrets Revealed!
As everyone knows without traffic; you are dead in the water. There are as many ways to get traffic as there are people it seems. Everyone is trying to sell you tips, tricks, and techniques to get traffic. Of course the best traffic is TARGETED TRAFFIC. Targeted traffic is traffic that is actually interested in what you have to offer.
More times than not, targeted traffic is received from the search engines. Since Google is the number one search engine, you should heed what they have to say about getting traffic.
Google has an immense amount of tutorials, articles, blogs, and other data they have available – you can get quite an education. I was doing research for a business I am working with for doing some Adwords on their site. Since Google has been ‘slapping’ some sites from some prominent names in Internet Marketing, I thought it prudent to do some research into Adwords at the Google site.
I urge you to go to Google and get a Web Masters account for your websites as the links and information on web site optimization, content, how they search, and the rest is important. I have had a web master account and have not really delved into the links until recently, so I was losing out.
All search engine are changing to look for CONTENT and not necessarily KEYWORDS. They do look for words in the content to determine what the page is about. This is how they are determining the rankings of pages. The ‘old school’ SEO stuff works to a degree; but, they are looking for original content that is RELEVANT. So the days of the article spinners may be over. The search engines are starting to weed garbage pages out and drop them from their search results.
We are going to what was originally intended for a search engine to do – find RELEVANT information about what you are searching for. It is not based on keywords that may or may not have a relevance to what is on the page. This is to eliminate the ‘gaming’ of the system. You have probably noticed that lately all you get is affiliate products when searching for anything – some not even related to what you are looking for. This is the reason for the changes in the search engines.
What does this mean to you? If you have original relevant content; you are OK. If not don’t be surprised if your pages fall out of the search rankings. Your Adwords sites may get dropped from the program and when that happens – you may not be able to put them back without serious rewrites, if at all.
You have to use ALL traffic sources to your best advantage and without a doubt search engines will provide your best long term traffic strategy. Using any MANUAL traffic source: traffic exchanges, banners, Safelist or the others; when you stop – your traffic stops. If you pay for credits and upgrade it will continue; but if you stop paying they will stop also. Search engine traffic will remain and is totally free and usually better targeted for what your CONTENT is geared to showcase.
Now there are lots of things that the search engines look at, and I can’t possibly go into here, but the the bottom line is they are looking for relevant content. This brings us to the really cool discovery!
Google itself suggests to look at your site with a TEXT ONLY browser. This is how they (and I am assuming all other search engines) look at your site with their “bots”. This is how they determine what the site is about and to determine where it goes in their database. I have talked about making sure your site is HTML compliant for getting better search engine rankings. If the bot can’t figure out or see parts of your site, you will not get a good ranking.
So how do you see your site in a text only browser? If you use Linux, just use one of the text browsers to look at your site. If you are on Windows, it is WAY more difficult. I tried for a few hours to find a copy of Lynx (text only browser) that I could actually get to run and work. So the easy way is to go HERE and input your web site into the page and you will see your site as the bots see it.
You may get a surprise. Your regular browser DOES NOT display your page as a text only browser does. All your fancy stuff may not even show up at all. If you don’t have title tags on your pictures and links, they will not show up correctly. Your ‘good’ stuff may be buried farther down the page and not be seen easily.
It will take some work on your part to get your page so the bots can see it and rank it for what you want it to rank for but will be worth it. Just think about actually getting customers while you sleep with no effort on your part – that is the Internet dream! You need to use all the tools to your advantage, look through the Google site and you will find amazing information on so many different things that it will leave you speechless.
