Search Engine Traffic
Search engine traffic is traffic you drive to your site through search engines like Google, Yahoo! etc comes from the search engines (obviously!). The best part about this is it’s free, and the party goes on until another site overtakes you (if you rest on your oars. Expecting to draw good traffic from the search engines without search engine optimization (SEO) is wishful thinking, unless you have a very big offline presence (eg Mr Biggs, Guardian Newspapers etc) in which case your offline customers or those who know you exist are looking for you.
Your biggest source of traffic will always be the search engines, if your don't have big pockets to splash banner advertising. You will need to master this part of your traffic building strategy. You must have heard that it is impossible to get your website ranked highly in the search engines, or that you have to pay. Nothing is further from the truth. More than 90% of the traffic we get at NigeriaGalleria is from search engines, and about 85% of that figure is from Google.
There is nothing that can stop your site from being in the top 10 search results for your target market. As long as you have the right tools and the right knowledge, driving massive amounts of free traffic from the search engines is quite possible.
There are two aspects to how search engines rank websites – they measure how relevant a website is (with reference to a specific search query) by measuring its on-page relevance and off-page relevance. On-page relevance is basically looking at what your website is about.
On the other hand, search engines value off-page relevance a lot more than on-page factors. Off-page relevance is all about getting links to your website. If you get links from websites in your niche that are highly ranked in the search engines themselves, then you’ll be in a good position to rank well in your niche. In competitive niches, search engine rankings are tough to get (like news which is already dominated by heavyweights like GUardian, ThisDay etc). To be considered more relevant than your competition you have to obtain a better link profile than them, and most competitive niches have websites with thousands of links. You may be able to rank quickly in Yahoo or MSN but when it comes to Google, building your search engine rankings takes a lot of skill/time.
SEO basics is covered in the SEO section.
Return to Guide to Starting Your Home Based Internet Business Index
