Driving Search Engine Traffic To Articles!

Internet opens the doors to a worldwide audience; if they can find the website. People search for all sort of things on the search engines, such as Google. This is the search engine traffic that visits the web pages on the websites or blogs in search of information.

What are people looking for? How do they find it? These become the two most crucial questions that need to be asked when trying to direct traffic to a website.

Let us first understand that this search-engine based traffic is free traffic and to gain access to this traffic, a webmaster has to work at two levels; the setting up of a perfect content management system and at the article level. Both become very important.

Here let us see from a writer’s perspective, at how a good article needs to be written to attract quality search engine traffic.

Out of the three sources for traffic; friends of the webmaster who come directly to the website; people who come to the site by following links at other sites; the traffic that is directed by the search engines to a particular article becomes very important. A decent website is said to be one that can attract search engine traffic, which is at least half of all the traffic.

Search engine traffic comes to different pages within the website and it solely depends on the content within the web pages. It thus becomes important that every article on a site draws some traffic to the site.

How search engines send traffic

The whole process starts when people type in a search phrase into Google or some other search engine. The search engine searches its databases to find that phrase and displays all the pages containing the phrase in an order. It is important that an article shows up at the top of the search results to increase clickthroughs. Search engines display the results based on the PageRank. It is necessary to put the keywords that people are looking for in the article to show up higher in the results. There are better chances for showing up early in the search results, if there are more keywords, if they appear more frequently and if they appear earlier in the article. Here, it is also important to understand that a webmaster has to be careful not to fake things by using irrelevant keywords or stuffing with too many keywords, as the site can get blacklisted by the search engines.

Keyword phrases to be used

This depends on who the article is aimed at. Try and think what sort of words people searching on this particular topic will come up with. What are they likely to type in the search boxes? Write down all the words or phrases, other topics that are closely related to the article topic, the names of famous people that are associated with this topic and the current hot topic that revolves around this topic. The challenge is to try and incorporate all of them into the article.

Popularity of the topic

All the topics are not popular and do not attract the same amount of interest. While iPhone attracts huge search engine traffic, it is not possible to only write about iPhones. Sometimes, a keyword that a webmaster wishes to target may not be receiving enough traffic, then the idea is to find a related keyword that has a lot of traffic and incorporate that into the article too.

Heading is Important

Getting the search phrase into the heading is the best way of getting into the good books of the search engines. This again has to be a word or phrase that people search for.

Related Keywords

Remember, that people do not search for what a webmaster has in mind. They search for what they have in mind. They could use different variations and combinations. There are several keyword tools that show up related keywords, which will give an idea of what related keywords or phrases need to be used in the article. If the website is about telescopes, then it becomes essential that all the articles and content contain the word telescope. However, the related words, such as the types of telescopes can be included in the pages.

Some of the keyword tools are; keyworddiscovery.com and freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Quote an authority

Another thing that helps is quoting an authority on the topic where possible. This helps bring authority to a website.

Captions- A neglected zone

Captions that are given for pictures and tables are another area where keyword rich sentences can be written. This is where many webmasters go wrong and write generic ones that sound good. In the search engine world, this is considered a huge crime.

Greek and Latin

Starting an article with Greek, Latin, Roman or Sanskrit words looks and sounds good, but that is where it all ends. It may even get a couple of people but definitely will not get the kind of traffic that one can get when plain English is written.

Long gone are the days of the printed word, when it was not the business of the writer to ensure the reader picks up the magazine. Good search engine rankings and traffic are now based not only on the structure of the site but also on the articles that are written. The power lies more in a good well-written article.

Written by
Hasan
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