How to Get Free Web Traffic

I just did a quick web search for "life coaching" world wide, and my site(s) came up at #3 on Alta Vista, #7 on Google, and #5 and #15 on Yahoo.

People ask me: Why do you come up in almost every search engine? How do you get these top listings? And how do you get over 1,000 visitors a week?

In this article I explain my secrets to free traffic. (Paid traffic we'll cover in another article). For those new to the web, I'll be talking about how to come up in the top ten listings (rankings) when someone searches for something like "life coaching" or "business coaching" on a search engine like AltaVista, Google, or Yahoo.

Firstly I'll outline the three ways you can go about it, and the one I recommend.

I think this is overkill until you are sure your site is making money (say $10,000 p.a. in revenue coming from your site). Why pay for traffic if you can't be sure that traffic will turn into dollars? Keep your expenses low until you can justify the investment.

Option 2) Buy reputable software to handle it

These days software can do everything from ensuring your pages are search-engine friendly, to submitting your 20 pages to 100 engines, 12 times a year (that's 24,000 submissions!) while you sleep. With prices coming down to below $200, this option now makes Option 3) obsolete.

A couple of problems with this. Firstly, you don't know the hundreds of tricks to make your page come up in the top ten rankings on engines, and would be stabbing in the dark. Secondly, it will take you a lot of hours to submit every single page to the major engines - and that's just the first time you do it! After the third time you sit down to do this, you'll kick yourself. Also, when you want to know how visible you are on the engines, do you really want to search all 100 engines, for each combination of key word, for every page on your site (easily 10,000 combinations)? Or would you prefer to leave your computer for an hour and come back to a summary report of your top rankings, including which rankings have changed recently?

For over 90% of coaches, without hesitation I recommend Option 2) Buy Software. (Note: That's unless you already have $10,000 in online revenue - then go for hiring a professional)

It's probably most useful if I mention the key things you should have in any software you buy. Then you can surf the web and research to your heart's content. Or if you prefer to buy the one I use and recommend, you'll find a link at the bottom to the free 30 day trial version.

Great Articles and Advice:
You want a powerful knowledge base so you can learn what the search engines are looking for. Also you'll want tips and tricks for how to get listed on the major directories like Yahoo. Ideally get one that updates it's Knowledge Base regularly.

Page Creation:
Your software should help you tweak your pages so they rank highly on the search engines, including automatically create the much talked about 'Meta Tags' in your pages, so you don't have to do it. Some will even create initial pages for you!

Automatic Submission:
Make sure it will submit to all the major search engines automatically. AND - that you can schedule it to do a little submitting to the engines each day, so you don't get flagged for spamming the engines.

Reporting:
You'll want a reporting engine so you can say "Tell me my rankings for all my web pages, on say the top 50 engines, for the keywords 'life coaching' and 'life coaching Canada'. I'll be back in an hour!" This will show you where you're doing well, and where you need to do some more tweaking or submitting.

Traffic Monitoring:
If you get a good one, you'll be happy to have this included without paying extra. Let's you view how many people visited your site, say in the last week or month, what search engines they came from, the pages they visited, and ideally what key words they entered into the engine!

So search the web for some good software. If they're any good, they probably come up near the top in the listings! (After all, that's what they do). Or if you want to try the one I use - I've so happy with mine I made them one of my preferred affiliates providers. It handles all the above recommended features plus a few more, and last time I looked the price was still under $200. You can read more about it here: WebPosition Gold, or go straight to downloading the free 30 day trial version here: 30 Day Trial Version