You don’t need to use paid keyword tools or services to conduct proper keyword research. One of the best-kept secrets to increase website traffic is simply to write about what’s popular now. A lot of people make keyword research a lot harder than it is, and that’s a shame.

If you want to know the general ideas for a niche, then go to an article directory and see what categories are listed there. An indication of popular niches would be a lot of articles in a certain category. To see what keywords are getting the most page views per article, search for those keywords on the search engines to see what articles come up then open thie first article to see how many page views it received.

The next best way to use free keyword research is to use the YouTube search engine. All you have to do here is search for certain keywords and phrases, then in the results which which videos got the most hits. This is a crucial tip for you if you intend to use video marketing as part of your traffic generation strategy.

The third best way to conduct free keyword research is to use Google’s keyword tool to gather together a nice list of related keywords. Google’s keyword tool is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to reporting actual search volume statistics, which is why it’s best use for doing LSI, latent semantic indexing keyword research.

The best keyword research and niche research is done when it is based on the reality, not numbers some tool gave you. The best way to do realistic keyword research is to see how many views the articles and video related to your niche got. Also when deciding on a niche just use common sense and think about what’s popular offline, as it will most likely be popular online, too

This article will look at 5 easy steps that you can use that will help you increase website traffic to your sites. The focus will be on free techniques that will increase your targeted traffic and eventually your sales.

1. Find Targeted Keywords: Using the correct targeted keywords is very important in bringing the right traffic to your sites that will convert into sales. The bottom line is you want to be receiving traffic while also having low competition with other advertisers. A great tool to assist in this search is Google Adwords Keyword Tool, it is free to use but is priceless.

2. Develop Unique, Quality Content: Unique content is a must have if you want the search engines to like your website. By creating quality content you will attract human visitors as well as the robots that crawl your site and this will help you get closer to the top ranking.

3. Link Back from Your Other Sites: If you own any other websites that are of a related topic you can link back to your own site and start the link building process. This process is what will help your websites page rank.

4. Exchange Links with Others: Along the same lines as linking between your own websites, is exchanging links with other websites of similar content. You can do this by making a simple request with the site owner to see if they are interested in a mutually beneficial trade.

5. Free Advertising: Article marketing is a free advertising technique that allows you to build links back to your website. When you write articles around keywords that have to do with your topic, you can submit them to the many article directories that are available on the internet. Included in your article will be a link back to your website which allows you to advertise your site for free.

In this article we discussed 5 simple steps that you can take that will increase website traffic and help to improve your sales as well. When you create unique content that is focused on the proper keywords, build links to your site in a variety of ways and advertise, your website will begin to get higher rankings that will help you to receive more targeted visitors as well as more sales.

The 5 steps above will not only help you increase website traffic, but also sales if they are done correctly. Understanding how to do each step can take time, you probably have more questions…

Want to learn more?

If you have researched search engine optimisation the chances are you would have come across the term “backlink”. A backlink is essentially a hyperlink that is found on an external website (external to yours) that points back to your website. These are really important for SEO - search engines put a lot of weight behind them. As example, go into Google and search for the term “click here”. I bet the number one result is Acrobat Reader, right? How can Google put this at number 1??

Look on the website and youll see that the term click here doesnt appear once on the website. Well, the reason is because tens of millions of websites have a link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader website with the anchor text click here (the anchor text is the writing you see on the screen with the hyperlink underneath). Google therefore thinks that this website MUST be the most relevant page on the internet for the search term click here.

What’s a good backlink?

So with the click here example you can see that backlinks are very important ” but Google also checks out other factors. The backlinks that come from important sites (those with a great page rank) are considered a lot more important than those that come from sites with no page rank. If you can get a banklink from Wikipedia for example, this would be considered a very good quality backlink and Google will put more weight behind it.

The quantity of backlinks are also important, although probably not as important as quality. The fact is nobody apart from those working in Google knows how the algorithm works.

In addition to quality and quantity of backlinks, the website that a backlink comes from should be relevant to the website its pointing at. For example, if someone puts a backlink on a car auction website that points to a travel company, the two websites are not relevant to each other so Google will put less weight behind the link.

Getting backlinks

Writing on forums with your backlinks in your signature is one method of generating backlinks. Another is to write blogs or articles. You must not ignore backlinks though if you are serious about getting on the front page of Google for your keyword term.