Keyword Ranking in Free Search Engine Listings

Quality traffic generation is the “secret” to making money on the Internet, whether you monetise your website with contextual advertising, affiliate programmes, your own products, or a combination of the three. If you use pay-per-click advertising, quality traffic generation and ranking highly in search results is a breeze! Of course, it will cost you money. Today, I’m going to reveal my traffic-generation strategy for free, “organic” search results.

Of course, I’m talking about search engine optimisation (SEO), and there are various approaches. Some are so-called “black-hat” techniques; these are designed primarily to fool the search engine robots into artificially improving the ranking for your webpage for searches that contain specific keywords. One example of a black-hat technique is white text on a white background; another example is text that would appear in a text-only browser such as Lynx, because the content style sheet places the elements off the page. Basically, anything that a user could not possibly benefit from is a “black hat” approach. Yet another example is writing comments on blogs that only contain links to your site. The use of such practices will result in your site eventually being removed from the search engine indexes. Search engines employ people to scour the web for sites taking this approach. As soon as these people discover what you are up to, you’ll be removed from the indexes, and that’s not a sustainable approach for any business.

The techniques I’m going to discuss are purely “white-hat.” These are legitimate practices as far as the search engines are concerned, and they will not get you into trouble such as having your listings removed.

Make your site worthy of being visited. Whether you provide quality articles, a discussion forum, or even a service to people such as online games, you want to supply content that people will want to read.

Within the bounds of providing good content for people to read, don’t forget the search engines. When you’re writing content, write it for human eyes to read, but to generate quality traffic from specific keyword searches, you’ll want to focus on a small number of keywords and make sure you use these keywords every now and again throughout your article. Once or twice, try to use the keyword in bold or italic (not excessively); make sure your keywords are in a heading (<h1> element), and in the title of your webpage; and it’s worth linking to other sites with the keyword as the “anchor text” (the text that can be clicked upon to reach the website). Unlike traditional writing approaches, try not to use many synonyms throughout your articles!

What keywords should you target? You need to research keywords for which you can realistically rank well. You won’t be able to rank well for high-competition, high-traffic phrases without a great deal of work. To find keywords worth considering, you may wish to use software products such as KeyWords Analyser or the well-reputed web-based subscription tool Wordtracker. Alternatively, use a free keyword research tool such as Overture’s web-based keyword assistant. Choose some keywords, and take a look at the sites that are available when you search for those keywords. Examine the top 5-10 sites for links back to the site; simply run a search on the domain name in quotes to find this information. If you see under 50 or so links for the top 5-10 sites then you can probably rank quite well for that keyword with minimal effort. Obviously, it’s worth looking at the frequency of searches for that particular keyword, and you can make an informed decision as to whether it is worth your while to target that phrase. I like to look for keywords that have traffic of the order of 10,000 to 100,000 searches per month, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.

It’s very strange that there are some keywords that have high levels of traffic, but not much has been written about them! It’s as if nobody is interested in these keywords. This occurs even in some competitive niches! These are the ideal phrases to search for. They take a bit of digging, of course. Not all of these keywords will provide quality traffic, so you also need to assess each keyword in turn for quality.

Search your logs for some hints as to how people are finding your site! Often, you will stumble across keywords that are quite easy to rank for with this approach. You can then check your ranking with the search engines, check how much traffic you can get from it, and take steps to boost your ranking if it is called for.

My approach is always to start small, and work my way towards higher-traffic keywords. As the popularity of my site builds, so will its chances of ranking for more competitive keywords.

Once you have found a keyword to target with your web page, you need links to your website from other sites across the web, ideally one-way; and the anchor text needs to be as close to the keyword you want to rank well for as possible (work it into the article as best you can). One of the best ways to do this is to write more articles about that topic for websites to publish for free. These need to be quality articles that provide good quality content to the reader. Your traffic generation comes from the author’s bio at the end of the article, which is where you get to add links to your site. If a search engine robot sees a hyperlink where your keyword is the anchor text, your ranking will be boosted for that keyword.

Once you’ve written the articles, you need to offer these to article directories such as Ezinearticles and Go articles. If they are good quality, they will be published. Make sure the link itself points to the specific page of interest to the person typing in the keyword. Also, try to get some traffic from the publisher’s page by giving people some sort of incentive to click through your link.

Note that a quick way of submitting to many directories is to use the Article Marketer distribution service. I personally find this approach far more convenient than submitting articles by hand to lots of article directories, or even using a tool to semi-automate this process; for me, it’s worth the subscription fee to the service. It’s worth making a separate submission to certain article directories that are not included in this form of distribtuion where they rank well for the keyword “article directory” in a Google search.

What’s good about this approach is that every article site that publishes your article is endorsing your website by providing an active link to it! It cannot be considered search engine spam, and chances are good that there will not be many external links on the page showing your article. The influence of the webpage on the search engines for each external link is believed to be inversely proportional to the number of links on that page, which is another thing that makes this strategy better than, for example, reciprocal linking.

The other approach that I would suggest you take is to visit forums that are targeted to your niche, and add links to your site there, while providing useful content within the forum. Always work within forum rules when using this approach.

I don’t suggest linking within blogs, although this strategy can work. By default, most blogs include code within your link to stop Google from following the links.

Another thing you can do to increase the click-through rate to your website is to give the page a <meta description> tag that is up to about 120 characters in length, and contains text that you want the search engines to publish. It’s no good being in position one for a keyword if nobody clicks on your link! Try not to include as much hype as you would for a pay-per-click ad, because search engines will probably not use your text if you do; in particular, I doubt that the exclamation mark (!) will do you any favours. Include your keyword in this a couple of times; it will appear in bold to the searcher, which will also help the click-through rate. Sometimes the search engines will publish your meta description, or the first part of it, in the free results listings. Other times they will choose other content scraped from your site.

In my experience with rankings from the “big three” search engines, MSN responds fastest to new links; Google comes in second; and Yahoo takes the longest. Most people find that Google is the slowest and Yahoo is in second place.

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer