Hey everyone, I hope you are having a nice week. I wanted to put together and share some of the strategies I use to build organic, or free traffic, to my sites. These aren’t rocket science and pretty much as whitehat as you can get. Let me know if you are using these strategies or if you would like to add to these organic SEO strategies please feel free to do so.

1. Unique Content Every Day – I think most people that have been in organic search a while would agree that frequently posted, original content is the best strategy you can use to get more free traffic to your site or blog. If you look at sites like Mashable, the leading Social Media resource, they are posting 30-40 new articles a day to their site, which builds the site much larger every week and basically posts their new pages into Google search results in seconds. This is what you want to acheive with any site, that instant search results effect with your content. Think of how much more traffic you can generate with more pages of content. But content has to be written by someone, I usually suggest outsourcing your content production to people like Mommy Bloggers that you can approach and Facebook friends that want to write for extra money, at around $10-15 per article. If you can’t do the outsource thing, you just have to power out as much content on as many different subjects as possible, depending on what you are promoting with your sites or blogs. I’m pretty much a WordPress enthusiast, so consider making WordPress your content management platform of choice for ease of posting and they have wonderful free templates available.

2. Sharing Your Content – Sharing is the best way to increase the exposure of your site’s content, especially in this Social Networking day and age. There is so much opportunity to have other people you know or are connected to share your content with people they know. The more compelling a piece of content, the more likely it will get shared and shared again. Also, the more you share other peoples content, by doing things like: Liking their post, Sharing their post, commenting on their post, and retweeting their post, the more they will share your content. Kind of like Karma I supposed, but it really is true that the more you do that for other people the more they will do it for you, I know this from experience. Some of the best places to share your content are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Groups and Digg. There are other but these are my mainstays. I do submit to social bookmarking sites too like Delicious, Reddit, and Google Bookmarks, but there is some question as to how much this benefits your content, although I personally think it helps in the long run to build inbound links and get a few more rankings from their sites.

3. Keyword Research – Its important in planning a new site or blog that you know what keywords are the most popular for that niche. You can use the Google Keyword Tool to mine the most popular phrases and related popular phrases so you know what keywords to focus your site on and the content you will create. This will yield popular keywords and more obscure keywords, but at the end of the day you need to hit on everything with your content and pages over time. One important thing to remember is to be focused with your site on your core topic initially and then you can get more expansive in related keywords as you go along posting. Hitting on more obscure keywords in your page titles and content can pull organic rankings usually easier than more popular keywords with a newer site. Over time, as you hone your site into a powerhouse of content and good optimization you may rank well under your core keyword phrases, but this is a work in progress that has to be improved over time with good SEO strategies in place.

4. Link Building – I wanted to cover Link Building a little bit because it’s a mysterious topic for most affiliate marketers and there is a lot of information and misinformation out there about it. My stance on link building is it’s a worthy thing to work on for you sites within reason. Some of the best ways to build link in my opinion are: good blog comments, forum post frequency with signature in place (keep your posts great though), blogroll links you can trade other bloggers for, online press releases (which contain a couple hyperlinks in the text), and social bookmarking. All of these methods are free (except press releases) and worthwhile to do once you set-up a procedure for doing them. Like anything, what you put into it is what you get out of it with your link building, and it grows over time so you have to stick to it and the rankings will improve. I mean it can’t hurt really to build links in these ways. Don’t be obnoxious with it though as one piece of advice.

These are just some ways to improve your organic search rankings and get more free traffic. I tried to keep it practical, so let me know if you have any questions or would like to discuss anything. Feel free to comment! thx!

Everyone always ask me, “how do I get more organic/free traffic to my website?” Wow, what a complex yet simple question. You have to ask yourself how much time, effort and resources can I possibly put into my organic strategy to achieve the most free traffic from natural or organic search results as possible. I tell people that first you have to analyze what you are already doing organically with your meta-tags and site content. First tweak this to improve upon what you are already doing. If you already have decent rankings then re-optimizing can get you more search rankings. Be careful of course not to “over-optimize” and lose your rankings, but a good tweak and lengthening of your Title tags can help a lot. Always having complete, unique meta-tags like the keyword and description tags on all pages is also good, although many people will tell you not to worry about them. I think the more content you have on each page in more places the better. Well-written content is also a good idea to give visitors something compelling to read. There are many ways to generate organic traffic to your site. Having a large site with lots of articles and other types of pages can bring more traffic by garnering more rankings. Think of each page of your site like fish hooks out there ready to snare a visitor. You should have thousands of fish hooks out there to pull in visitors from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live. Search engines tend to really like fresh content that their spiders pickup when they revisit your site. If you publish uniquely written articles, posts, or new pages on a daily basis it will encourage the search spiders to revisit your site more frequently, even numerous times a day looking for new content. Their goal is to provide searchers with the most valuable search results on particular search query, so make sure you producing good, unique and valuable content when the spiders and visitors come. The search engine companies know how long people tend to stay on your site/pages and they value sites that have high-page views per visit and length of stay on site. Having an RSS feed on your site is a great idea because you can submit that feed to numerous RSS directories and ping others. Having a comprehensive and proactive organic SEO strategy is a must for all websites regardless of size. You should alway be trying to find new places to list your site, like sociual networking sites, blogs and forums. If you have thousands of listings in business directories, sites and blogs that describer your company, with a link to your site, over time you will have a greater volume of traffic to your site. Climbing up the search rankings takes time and should be look at like a quest for fire. That may sound Cliché, but it really is a competition whether you view it that way or not. Once you have achieved the highest rankings you can attain for your major keyword phrases, you can turn full focus on to building your site outward with valuable content. You can never go wrong by publishing good content on your website. This is only one internet marketers viewpoint…its up to you to forge ahead…however, if you would like to hire me for consultation on SEO, PPC, or Affiliate Marketing please contact me. Now go out there and publish!