Many people build a website under the impression that traffic will start coming. This, frankly, never happens. To drive traffic and ultimately make money from your website, you need to focus on optimizing your content pages and marketing materials so they can be found more easily on search engines. In other words, you can’t just write whatever you want and hope someone sees it. You really have to write what people want to see. This process can get a bit complicated, but the following information should give you a fair idea of what’s going on and how you can use it to your advantage.
Whenever someone uses a search engine, they typically use a keyword or key phrase to search for whatever it is they’re looking for. This is how most people will find your site. To reach your audience effectively, you need to know what keywords people are using to reach sites like yours. Then you need to make sure you use those words in your web content and marketing materials so that your site can appear as a search result.
Each search engine offers tools for web developers to help them figure out what these keywords are. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool, for example, allows you to see how many people are searching for a certain keyword online and what common forms of that keyword are being used. There you can also see how many other sites are targeting the same keyword to give you an idea of your competition. Think of words related to your site’s content, products, and services, and then see if other people are using them online.
You should have a good list of keywords to use instead of focusing on one or two. You can’t see how effective they will be from the early stages, so you have to have a widespread option to build. You can then find out what words most people are using to reach you through analytics tools later. However, the entire process starts with this keyword research and is vital to your overall success. If your site doesn’t have the right keywords in place, you won’t get the right kind of traffic. A little research will go a long way for you.