Friday 15 June 2012

How to Get Organic Traffic from Google

This is a question that I’ve been asked by bloggers, writers, internet marketers, entreprenuers and webmaster many-a-times: “How long does it take for a website to start getting some organic traffic? Especially if it’s a website that is updated with unique content regularly, and has also been submitted to all search engines, such as Google and Bing.”

This is a valid concern for many bloggers, especially those who have just started off. However before we get to the answer to this problem, it is important to first understand what organic traffic is, and why it is important in the first place.

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic refers to free traffic that comes in from search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing. It is the traffic that you get when pages from your blog or website appear in the search results. It is referred to as ‘organic traffic’ because it comes freely and naturally from search engines, for instance if someone searches for a particular keyword (or a phrase), and is redirected to a page on your blog/website from the search, you’re getting free ‘organic’ traffic to your website.

Benefits of Organic Traffic

As you would understand, the ability to get organic traffic from search engines is extremely essential, as traffic from search engines is one of the biggest sources of traffic (and revenue) for any blog out there.

First off, organic traffic is free, and understandably, it is highly-targeted traffic. Visitors who come on your blog from Google were searching for a specific keyword/phrase which was related to the content on your website. For instance if you run a blog on the NBA, and someone looks up ‘Jeremy Lin stats’ in Google, and is referred to your blog from there, you are getting extremely targeted traffic from people who are within your website’s niche.

This is why all bloggers do whatever they can to get organic traffic – search engines get you targeted traffic for free, as opposed to PPC and other per-click, per-impression or paid advertisement campaigns.

How to Get Organic Traffic to Your Blog

Now that we’ve defined what organic traffic really is, as well as how beneficial it is, we come to the matter at hand: what can blogs and websites do in order to get organic traffic? The following is a set of points which will help you to achieve this feat:

1. Unique Content: The most important thing to be able to get organic traffic is unique content. If you don’t have unique content on your blog, Google will not even consider indexing your site for popular search engine keywords and queries. Furthermore, if you blog contains a lot of copied, plagiarized and spun content, and Google gets a whiff of it, you will in all probability end up getting de-indexed and/or permanently banned from Google.

Google has become particularly strict with its indexing criteria and policies, especially after the Panda update. Websites with plagiarized content (among other things) have all been penalized. This means that these website have stopped getting traffic from Google.

If your blog is updated with unique, well-written, well-researched content on a regular basis, Google will list your website for keywords, and visitors will be referred to your blog when they search for those keywords.

2. Provide Value, Engage your Audience: It is also important to remember that your blog exists solely for one purpose: to provide the people with solutions/information. Provide people with valuable material, valuable information, present them with solutions, and discover innovative ways to engage and entertain people with your blog so that spend the maximum amount of time on your blog reading your posts, putting up comments, and being a part of the community.

When people are engaged, they actually spend some time on your blog and your bounce rate is low, Google immediately ranks your better for your keywords.

To provide value, you need to have passion for whatever you are writing about.  Pat Flynn wrote an awesome post titled Do You Need Passion to Profit Online? which really summarizes this.

3. Backlinks: If you are updating your websites with unique content on a regular basis, but you don’t have a lot of relevant backlinks, your content might be of interest to some people, but Google probably still won’t list it in the search results.

Without relevant backlinks, and particularly those from authority sources, Google has no way to know how credible your information really is.

Even if you’re getting traffic from social mediums and other forms, having backlinks and link juice is extremely essential, especially from relevant, authority and high-PR websites. Each backlinks counts as one vote in your favor in the eyes of Google, the more ‘votes’ you have, the better. When Google discovers that your blog is getting traffic from authority sources, it will try to list you as high up as possible for your keywords.

And unless you start getting some link juice from these sources, you’ll never receive a large amount of organic traffic, even if you’re putting up fresh content on your blog regularly.

To see how you're doing with your efforts, spend some time every month checking your backlinks using services like Google Webmaster Tools or Majestic SEO.  That way you can see if what you are doing is working or not.

Concluding Words

Basically, what you’re aiming for is for Google and other search engines to take notice. Once they do, they will start ranking you better for your keywords and traffic from these search engines will start flowing in.

It is unrealistic, however, to expect any miracles immediately. But if you’re updating your blogs with fresh content, and establishing a network of quality backlinks, organic visitors will soon start flowing in. It might not be a very large amount of visitors in the beginning, but at least you’ll know you’re headed in the right direction.

Lastly, the purpose of all this is to be ranked on the first page of the SERP, or as close to it. It is a well-established fact that visitors rarely go beyond the first page when the look something up in a search engine (according to a statistic, 80% of search engine visitors never go beyond the first page!), therefore it is important to be able to rank as high up the SERP as possible for your keywords. Aim for that first page!

34 comments:

  1. Gr8 Post..
    1 Ques For You Dany..What Is the Importance Of alter tag when you build backlinks ?
    is it good practice to use different alter tags..On every backlink..

    Computer Tricks

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  2. Thanks Daniel - this post was exactly what I was looking for!

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  13. Thanks for sharing your many ideas here. I totally rely upon organic traffic to gather new visitors to my site.

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  21. haha I have the same google type of blog. now i can see how im going to get traffic. thanks

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  26. Increase Youtube Views
    Really i appreciate the effort you made to share the knowledge.The topic here i found was really effective to the topic which i was researching for a long time.

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  27. Thank you! getting organic traffic is possible through unique content for sure..I've experienced it so...Please write about humming bird update also!!

    Amfas Tech

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  28. amaizing information , i see that this article will help me very much in making my website rank better on google to get organic traffic on it .I also have some of confusions can you help me

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  30. I admire this article for the well-researched content and excellent wording. I got so involved in this material that I couldn’t stop reading. I am impressed with your work and skill. Thank you so much. high da backlinks

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