How Do I Get Traffic To My Website?

Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Admin

Google and other search engines have the job of providing their customers with what they want - which is information on a variety of subjects. Unless the customer has the correct address of a website he is interested in then he must use another method to find what he is looking for.

This, of course, is when he will search for the chosen topic or product by entering a phrase or word. This works fabulously well and with a little persistence, almost any information on any subject at all can be found. All very nice for our customer but what about the owners of websites? It is not unusual for a search term to bring up over a million choices where the customer can surf to his hearts content. Great! if every time he hits the enter button, it’s your site that comes up top of the list. I doubt that is happening or you wouldn’t be reading this information.

So how does a search engine decide who goes where?

In very general terms, there are two types of search engines. The first type will chiefly use what is known as a ‘crawler’ or ’spider’ system. The second type mainly uses a ‘human directory system’ here website marketers submit a short description of their website and once a search has been entered a search will be made on these descriptions. Many search engines use a combination of these two to a greater or lesser degree. However, for the purpose of this article we will concentrate mainly on the first type.

Search engines such as Google use crawler or spider search engines. In effect the spider will visit every web page in turn and will examine such things as page title, body copy and links as well as other criteria. The spider will return on a regular basis to check to see if there are any changes within the pages. For each website the spider runs through all the pages following the internal links, thus, reading every page.

What the spider finds out about the website is then transferred to the search engines index or catalogue. This is where the search engine software looks when someone enters a search term. When a new website is published it will only, at first, be accessible via the web address. Until the information is indexed the search engine will be unable to perform a search. This can take some time to happen sometimes weeks, sometimes months.

Once a word or phrase has been entered the search engine software goes to the index running through millions and millions of pages looking for matches to the search. It then produces lists of what, it believes, is relevant information and shows them to the searcher.

This process is done following a set of special rules called ‘algorithm’ (the exact formula used by any search engine is a closely guarded secret) all are different but operating within the same basic rules.

Let’s look at some of these.

Keywords

The criteria for keywords involves both location and frequency on a web page. The search engine will look at the title of the site and if the relevant search term appears there the site will get a little star. The metatag (description) will be checked for the relevant term - if it’s there another little star is awarded. Within the body of the page if the word appears near the top and throughout also near the bottom another little star is awarded. All very simple really, except that there are millions of websites all competing for little stars. Nevertheless, this is still important stuff.

There really is no difference between a human and a search engine trying to find a topic, both are looking for clarity, it’s just that the search engine can’t use emotions and judgment it can only rely on what the words say.

Once upon a time when the internet was younger, just by repeating the term lots and lots of times on a page was enough to send sites up the ranks. That is not so now. More and more search engines have the ability to check that the content is of good quality and by just repeating a word in a random manner will do no good whatsoever.

Off Page Ranking

The most important part of this process is linking. To illustrate this - you are a film producer and you have a great story and ask lots of unknown actors to appear in your film once it’s finished you find it’s only vaguely successful at the box office. Now, you have another great story and you invite a few very well known actors to star in the film - this time it’s a great success - why? because you are inviting celebrities and not unknowns to star in the film. Linking works much the same way. It’s very important to get other web sites to link to you and vice versa but if you can link to well known sites that, for example, Google already likes, sites with high quality content and loads of traffic, then, the search engine will surmise that you are a fairly important website and should be considered for a higher rank.

Also if a lower ranked website is receiving lots of ‘click through’s and is obviously becoming popular, the search engine may well decide to lower a high ranking website and give more credence to the lower ranking site.

Unfortunately, this is all a bit of a balancing act and the goal posts are constantly changing. But don’t despair there is a lot you can do to get your website where it will be noticed.

The Team at Website Traffic Revealed

For lots more information on how to get traffic to your website please visit: http://www.google-freeadvertising4all.com