If you have a website or are planning to create your own piece of online real estate, you will undoubtedly want some people to see it. Keywords are really important when setting up your site. You need to make sure that you are using the right keywords and that you are using them correctly. After all, the idea of free traffic is all important.

Google and Other Search Engines

The way people find your site, without you having to advertise, is through a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Lycos or Alta Vista. In order to do that you will firstly need to ensure that you are using the keywords or key phases that your potential market is going to look for.

Keyword research is very involved and it will take a lot more than a paragraph in an article. It is a skill that must be acquired through knowledge and practice and looking at how the professionals do it. There are many tools available to help but if you want targeted traffic you will need to do it well.

There really is no right way or wrong way only the way that you get the best results. This may take time and a bit of tweaking and you will eventually get there.

Content, Competition and Ranking

So you have your keywords sorted out and your website is published, you check your keywords on Google and… Nothing! Your site is not even on the first 100 pages. Here are some possible reasons:

• There is too much competition with the keywords that you are using (but you should have seen that when you did your keyword research).
• It might be too early. It takes time for Google’s crawlers to index all the pages on the web.
• You have no content on your site to index and/or you have not submitted a sitemap.
• You have NO BACKLINKS!

You need to have other websites link to your site which will help your PageRank and get you onto that elusive Page #1. PageRank is a measure out of 10 ranking your site for their search engine.

Backlinks Explained

Suppose you ran around with a sign saying, “I am great!” No one is going to take you seriously. But, if a bunch of other people wore signs saying that you are great, now that would mean something. Even better would be if a well known and trusted celebrity wore a sign saying that you are great, that would really boost you.

Well, backlinks are very much the same to Google. You are not going to get a lot of recognition trying to tell the other websites about your great site. But, if a whole bunch of them said that your site is great, other people will visit it and Google will recognise that. If you manage to get backlinks from a website will a high PageRank you will start doing really well.

Besides the improved PageRank you will also start generating that all important holy grail of internet marketing… Free traffic!