Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Website - By: Laura P. Taff

It's a dream for many people to work from home online. I've been doing it for more than four years now, and I'm still learning new things. Though search engine algorithms may change every other day, some things have not changed. There are some basic things you need to do to drive targeted traffic to your website. First, you have on page SEO factors. (SEO means search engine optimization). Then you need to get links to your website from other high quality websites, and you have to do it in a way that ensures that the traffic you get is the traffic that wants what you are offering. The most important factor in all of this is your keyword phrase.

What is a keyword phrase? Well, say you are going fishing this weekend with your dad and you want to buy him a new tackle box. So you hop on over to google and enter the words “tackle box”. When you get the results, you'll see page upon page of links to websites that offer tackle boxes. So, “tackle box” was your keyword phrase. Let's flip that over to a person who is selling tackle boxes online.

If you've got a website that offers fishing gear, you're going to want to come up in the top search engine listings for the keyword phrases people look for. When people type in tackle box, you want them to find your website listed at the top of those link lists in the search engines, right? So you need to let the search engines know what your site is about so they can send people your way. The way search engines know what your site is about is by looking at the meta tags and the hyper text to the links coming into your website. You don't want the text to say “click here”, you want it to say “tackle box”.

But there's more! There could be thousands of sites out there with a general phrase like tackle box, so you want your keyword phrase to be very descriptive. Maybe you offer soft tackle boxes. According to the google keyword tool, eight hundred and eighty people looked up “soft tackle boxes” last month. So now we're not just talking about a general tackle box, these people have a specific one in mind. Any visitor that clicks on that link would be a visitor that wants to buy a soft tackle box most likely, so that's the keyword phrase you want to use. Maybe you offer discount tackle boxes. Same thing...now you are more specific and the more specific you can get, the more targeted buyers will come to your site and hopefully buy.

As a rule of thumb, try to keep your keyword phrases at a minimum of three words. One and two word phrases are usually too general and have much more competition for the top spots on the search engines. You can find what phrases people search for on google's keyword search tool. Type in a phrase that you think your site is about, and see how many people looked up that phrase last month. It will also give you a list of other relative keywords and the results for those as well. Remember that your site won't just have one keyword phrase that works. Maybe you also sell specific types of tackle, like for deep sea fishing. The phrase “sea fishing tackle” was typed into google over 8,000 times last month. So you could use both search terms and get even more exposure to your website.

You also don't have to link everything to your home page. If you are going to submit an article about deep sea fishing and link it with the hyper text “sea fishing tackle”, you can link it directly to the page on your website that offers sea fishing tackle for sale. This is called deep linking. If you write an article to be submitted to article directories, you typically get two links per directory for that, so you could do one link to your home page and one to a deep link. Either way, this drives targeted traffic to your website or product page.

About the Author

Click on the keyword elitelink at the bottom of Laura's blog post to find out how it can help you dominate the search engines and get more traffic. Read Laura's blog, Anna & Essie, every Tuesday for more tidbits on how to work from home online.

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