You got your site up, your articles written, so now what? Well, we need to optimize your site now for search engines. Since you have advertisements on your site now, you’re going to want people to come to your webpage and click on them otherwise you won’t earn any money. So our goal now is to get more people to come to your website from search engines. The proper term in ‘Webmaster’ lingo for the number of people that come to your site is ‘traffic’, so every time I use the term ‘traffic’ from now on, just think of the number of people that come to your site. The best way to get traffic to your website is through search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Just about everyone uses search engines these days to find information, so it shouldn’t be any surprise for me to point out that most websites get a majority of their traffic from search engines. The most popular search engine by a landslide today is Google, so this guide is going to focus on Google. Yahoo and MSN are important too, but since about 80% of all search done on the internet are through Google, it makes sense to focus on Google, I don’t recommend readers to even think about Yahoo or MSN at this point.
Okay so what now?
The goal in this part of the tutorial is to get your website ranking on Google for whatever your site is about. If you made a site about Earl gray tea, you want your website to appear somewhere on the first page on the Google search results for the search query ‘Earl Gray Tea’. Ranking on Google for whatever your site is about is the best way to get traffic to your site because when so long as your website appears on the first page of Google, you’ll keep getting traffic and in turn, keep making money. You’d imagine the search results on the first page of Google to get the most visitors, which is true, but did you know that 95% of people never go to the second page of the search results? What does this mean for you? Well, you want your site to get on the first page, because anything past the first page won’t do you any good. Another piece of interesting information; 60% of people only click the top 3 results on the first page of Google, so our goal is to ultimately get your new website on the first page of Google and in one of the top 3 spots. This isn’t easy, but it’s definitely doable. It’s also extremely rewarding.
I get it, appearing on the first page of search results is important, but how does Google rank websites?
Well in order to get your website to appear on the first page of Google, you first need to understand how Google ranks websites in the search results. The fact is there are hundreds if not thousands of factors that Google looks at when ranking websites in the search results, so instead of trying to analyze every little detail we’re going to look at the big picture and work on the most important things that Google looks at when ranking websites. This will be explained further down the page.
Another term you should be familiar with is ‘Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. It’s the practice of tweaking a website to rank better on Google. Everything Google looks at to rank a website can be broken down into two categories, On-page and Off-page. The first thing we’re going to look at is ‘On Page’ SEO and then we’ll look at “Off Page Seo”.