Driving FREE Traffic with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on Blogs

Unless you just arrived from Pluto (with the appropriate visa, of course) it is not news that the Internet is the big thing now! The question is this: How are you leveraging it to your advantage? Companies are selling online, everybody is doing online marketing to get free traffic from the internet, and the world is rapidly shrinking! A recent study showed that one out of every eight couples who married in the U.S. last year met online. So here are some more questions: What are you doing? Are you doing it right? What should you do?

First of all, if you have a website and your traffic is not what you’re expecting, you need to do some serious internet marketing and SEO. This doesn’t mean you need to spend large amounts of money on pay per clicks or other types of advertising. I do recommend it and it is really helpful when starting an online business, but there are some “must do” things, like starting a blog on your website.

A blog will help you achieve a number of things:

• Good content for search engines to crawl
• More and more search terms and KEYWORDS
• Bring you or your business closer to your clients/followers
• Having the right stats program will help you make the right decisions for your market/niche
• Drive FREE traffic to your website
• Give you sales leads

Starting a blog is very easy and there are a number of free blog providers out there. Among the ones I would recommend are wordpress.com and blogger.com. Both provide completely free blog services and starting your blog couldn’t be easier – except for the content! Just go to whichever website you like and register for a free account. Input some information, such as your websites address, email, a password, and a little more and you’re set. You can now start publishing information to your blog. Welcome to the blogosphere!

Now here’s the most important tip I can give you: When writing a blog you have to make it keyword rich, but do not repeat your keywords too many times. To avoid being considered as keyword SPAM, you must select your article title very carefully, since this is what search engines read first. Your main keyword should always be in your title. This is critical to start getting free traffic.

What you should write about is simple. If you’re in insurance, then write about insurance news. Write what you think about the latest insurance law or how to choose your insurance policy. If you’re into a specific insurance niche, write about it. You can pretty much write about anything you feel will be important for your clients to read about. Your material will eventually get “crawled” by search engines and start driving FREE traffic from search engines to your website. Again, all totally for free.

Currently, there are 31 billion searches on Google every month! In 2006, this number was 2.7 billion. The world is flocking to the Internet, and I believe you should be getting some of those searches pointed to your website.

Having the right stats software will also help you think of new things to write about. Google offers a free analytics software you can easily integrate into your blog. This tool will allow you to see where your visitors are coming from, what are they browsing for, which part of your website has the most clicks or visits, approximately how long a visitor stayed on your website, and how many visits you have had, among other very detailed information. With this information, you can decide what to write about next.

For example if you have more visits from Texas compared to California, perhaps you can write about a new insurance product specifically for Texas or new low auto rates for Texas residents. Target information like this is how your blog and website will be found by users searching the web.

Getting sales leads from your blog is also very easy. Post a couple of ads on the sides, top, or within your content for your users to click. These ads should be related to your article content; otherwise the number of clicks won’t amount to many at all. Another way to drive sales leads is to mention your products in your article. If you’re writing about auto insurance, mention that you can provide them with a free no obligation online auto quote. Don’t make it sound like a commercial; in other words don’t try to sell. Frame it as a comment, and sales will come in.

I hope I have planted a “blogging” seed in your mind. It is a fast, free, and easy way to search engine optimize your website. If you liked my article, don’t forget to comment about it. To read more about Google analytics, or to sign up, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/.