No matter what type of site you start, or how you choose to monetize it, there is one common denominator that will determine your success – and that’s traffic. Yes, it all comes down to how many people actually visit your site. If you know what your traffic levels are going to be, you can accurately estimate how much you’re going to be making.

As I mentioned in a previous post, three quarters of your traffic will come from the search engines. Although there are many factors involved that will determine where your site ends up in the results pages; there are two things that will affect how much importance Google and company places on your site to begin with. These are, content and links.

Search engines love content. If you continue to update your site with fresh, original content by way of articles, you will be rewarded by having your site crawled more often by the search engine bots, and you will also start ranking higher in the SERPS. And let’s face it, the more pages you have out there, the more words you have out there, and the greater the chances are that you will rank for those keywords or phrases.

The second thing that search engines just love are links pointing back to your site. They especially love it when the keywords you are trying to rank for are in the live links on other sites. This is called anchor text. In other words; if I’m on a site and I click a live link that takes me to your site, you will reap the benefit of having a live link to your site. If you are trying to rank for a certain keyword and that keyword is in the live link I just clicked on, the link is worth much more in the eyes of the search engines. If that site is in a similar niche as yours, it’s worth even more. For example: If you have a dog grooming site and someone that owns a site about dogs links to your site, that’s one valuable link my friend.

To further complicate matters, each individual website carries with it something called a “page rank.” This is the importance that Google assigns to an individual website. The scale is from zero to 10. If you have a link from a page rank five site, it’s going to be worth a lot more than a link from a one or zero. It’s just one big popularity contest.

How do you get a high page rank? Why that’s simple: get more links. While the whole thing might sound a little “chicken-or-the-egg,” you will slowly develop page rank over time.

Anyway, I’m getting carried away here. Suffice it to say that if you continue to post fresh content and you actively seek links from other websites, you will become more important in the eyes of the search engines and you will start ranking higher for more competitive keywords. That’s when the traffic really starts snowballing – but it really is a slow process and there are no short cuts.

Why would anyone go through all this simply to get traffic?

Because, once you have a decent amount of traffic coming to your site, it will take less and less to maintain that level and the income it produces.

You see how this can create a residual income effect?

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Filed under: Internet Marketing

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