The lifeblood of any online business is traffic and the subject is one that interests Internet Marketers all over the world. It’s a fairly simple process but one that people generally find difficult, so here we present a simple guide to the subject – no bull or frills, just simple, straightforward advice on how to make sure you get tons of traffic and therefore tons of sales!

The first step is to pick the right url. Google has suggested that keyword rich url’s will be downgraded in importance but there is no sign of this happening anytime soon.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you have a plan for a new site which is all about making pasta. What domain name should you choose? This depends on the number of searches which people make for specific search terms. So lets take a look at some typical search terms around the subject and see if we can choose a good one. You can use a number of paid tools to look at typical search terms – such as Market Samurai – but Google has a free tool which is very good. You can use it by going to:

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none

So let’s add the keywords “making pasta” and see what results. You can see a screenshot below.

You can see from this list that “making pasta” has 18100 searches a month, however “how to make pasta” has 74000 searches a month. Even “how to make pasta sauce” has 27100 searches a month. The next question is to see if any of these are available as a domain name. There are a number of sites which provide the ability to check availability. We use namecheap.com – and a quick check reveals that both howtomakepastasauce.net and howtomakepastasauce.org are both currently available!

Once you have a suitable url it’s time to find some suitable keywords and use them to name pages and categories on your website. This is done in exactly the same way and you are obviously not restricted in the phrases that you choose. Simply pick the phrases that have good search numbers and not too much competition.

The simple aim here is get the site ranked in the search engine rankings for your chosen term…..and a future article will show you how. It’s important to ensure that the major search engines have indexed your site….meaning that they know it exists and can judge a suitable ranking for it. You can inform the search engines each time you update your site or add new content. This is called “pinging”. Basically this is telling the search engines that new content exists and they come and crawl it and rank the site again. Many sites exist to automatically ping the search engines and one of the best is Pingler.com.

This ping site offers a number of packages and the best value is the premium package which offers automatic pinging of 25 url’s. These can be pinged with any periodicity between 3 and 10 ten days. The cost is a very low $2.99 a month!