This is a guest article by Chris Weber
Utilizing free traffic from search engines has been one of the leading strategies to make money online for a while now. People everywhere are using search engines to find answers to their questions or service needs. If you have a website or a Webpage in the search results, you will get free traffic from search engines.
I’ve created a recipe for success when it comes to building niche websites aimed at free search engine traffic. Today is your lucky day because I’m giving out this recipe right now for free. I know there is an abundance of content regarding this topic online, but I want to aim at the black and white aspects. Let’s keep this simple and to the point.
1. Create a Brand ‘On Topic’
It’s important to create a brand for your small website. I always like to use something that is easy to understand and easy to remember. You also want it very on topic of what your niche is. Have your brand name around your topic. A lot of people screw this up quite easily. For instance, if my traffic search quarries are aimed at “dog training,” then I need to name the brand with that phrase (if possible). How does “Billy’s Dog Training” sound? It’s cheesy but super easy to understand. Keep it simple so everyone understands it crystal clear.
2. Don’t Stress the Tech Side
I see way too many people stress about how their Webpage looks and the color of that and the fonts and so forth. Worry about your quality content! Your content needs to be better than the rest of the sites that Google is ranking right now that you have to beat. The color of the fonts and what layout you have won’t win over a visitor.. but very high quality information will.
3. Make Good Videos
Utilize making good videos about your niche and what your displaying to you videos. YouTube is the second largest social network in the world. People use it for videos and love the visual media side of things. Good videos can drive tons of traffic to your site. I have literally made good enough videos to drive enough traffic to a site where I no longer needed google traffic because of the videos traffic. It can bring great things to your site. Link from your videos to your site.
4. Drive Traffic from Forums
This is an old school method that still works great today. Just join forum communities that are related to your niche sites topic and post links to your site when they are relevant or just use your signature link. Signature links can really still drive tons of traffic. If you add value to these forums, people will click through to your links. Don’t be spammy or you will get kicked out fast. SEO is a tough art when it comes to building backlinks. Think about just obtaining traffic before worrying about SEO.
5. Content. And Then More
Your site can’t have enough content. You always see people asking the question “how much content do I need for Google to rank my page?” It really is the magic question. Your going to have to start testing waters with how much content is needed on a site for your particular niche. Fifty articles isn’t even considered a lot in most niches so you will need a good jump on it. Continue adding content to your site and make your visitors happy to where they can answer all their questions and needs from your site.
6. Build Some Links
The topic of link building is a touchy subject. If you build the wrong links it could penalize your site in the search rankings for months. My advice is to be hesitant about every link you build. The happy medium between link building is still posting links but in a slow steady pace. Most importantly though, keep your backlinks in pages that are related to your niche site. Let’s take a deeper look into what links we want. Let’s say our niche is ‘dog training’ related. I have personally become so paranoid that I only build links with niche keyword related words in the core domain. Here is an example to define what in trying to express here.
Good Site: www.pets-animals.net/anything
Bad Site: www.parenting101.net/dogs
You notice that even though the ‘bad site’ has a sub page that is related to my niche of “dog training” but because the core domain of the site and core theme sort of say isn’t related to my niche… I’m staying clear of that.
The next factors I look at when determining if I want a link on the page are ‘domain authority’ and ‘moztrust’. These are both metrics from the Moz platform and a tremendous tool for SEO. Keep your links on pages above a level 20 for ‘domain authority’ and you want only links from sites that have above a level 5 for MozTrust. Both these metrics are actually coming from the core domain itself. A lot of people worry about page authority for a separate page but all pages being created on the domain will eventually gain page authority with time. So even if the page is new it will eventually gain page authority.
The heart of your link building campaign needs to be focused on pages that are RELATED to your niche. This is the single most important factor. Secondly will e the trust and authority.
*Common Mistake: Building links only to your homepage of website. Link to your inner pages even if they aren’t meant to rank!
Wrapping Up
There are some other important aspects to ranking niche websites but these are the core concepts. A common mistake for beginners is to dwell on these aspects too much of the tech side of the website and fail to put out good content. An awesome video or amazing content is going to rule over an ‘exact keyword’ title tag. Put yourself in the shoes of your visitors on your website and ask yourself.. Is this website helpful to me as a searcher to these search queries?
To read more about dominating niche websites with search engine traffic, you can visit me at the website geeks community. Thanks for the interest and let me know what you think.