Affiliate Marketing 101

It’s undeniable that the one thing you need to succeed in your online business is traffic. And free traffic beats everything else. And where’s the best place to get free traffic? Google and other search engines.

How do we get free traffic from Google?

The process works in a way that you have experienced many many times. You visit your favorite search engine. Type in something you’re looking for. And click one of the links that shows up. Well, the link you clicked on just send free traffic to that website owner. So the real question is how you get that free traffic.

If you’re like most people you only click links on the first page or two. The truth is that this first page of results receives nearly all the clicks. And believe it or not, the first 3 results receive over 70% of the traffic.

This means that to get any real traffic you need to be on the first page in Google. To do that, you need to be “ranked” in Google’s Top 10 results. Which brings up..

What is SEO?

SEO means that your website is clearly about something specific, Google knows that that is and thinks others will agree and find your site useful. It’s a complex formula that only people working for Google know exactly. There are several factors that we do know.

Getting indexed

First, before you can get ranked highly, Google has to know you exist. This is called getting “indexed.” What this means is that Google visits your site and records information about it in their database.

In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. Links from other sites are the easiest way to accomplish this. Google will actually follow the links on sites it already has indexed to find new sites and index them.

Use your Twitter and Facebook updates to get quick indexed links to your site. These sites are very popular so Google indexes them multiple times a day. So any new links will be followed right away.

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.

Here’s what’s important in ranking:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

SEO content

This is the SEO work you do on your page. You need to make sure your content matches the search terms you’re going after. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. 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. Google uses all of this content to figure out what your site is really about.

Link juice

The next thing to consider is your links. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. It’s very important that you have more links coming in than you have going out. The more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be.

Article spinning is a super easy way to get a bunch of inbound links. With this strategy what you do is write an article about the topic you’re targeting. You have to also write several different versions of your articles. And then upload a different versions to a bunch of sites that allow you to add content. And the more you do the better.

Increasing your activity

And lastly, it’s seems clear that Google expects important pages to be actively updated. Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time. So you need to update your pages often. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.

Comments from other people on your page are another fantastic way to keep your content updated. So, obviously, you need to get people to visit your site on your own, too. Online forums are simple source of real live visitors.

Create profiles on lots of forums about your site’s topic. Then become active in the forum. Always include a link back to your site. This generates even more links back to your site. And it will also get real visitors to your site.

Conclusion

It’s important that you do everything listed here. Unfortunately, rewriting your articles again and again. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And posting your articles and comments takes a lot of time. And you’re already too busy, so you mostly likely will never do any of it.

Fortunately, you can get rank builder software to do all the grunt work for you. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you can. And then you’re sure to get it done. And not doing it means you will never get free traffic from Google.