Traffic is what helps the site owners make money on the net. There are hundreds of different strategies to drive traffic to your website. You can do the paid strategies like PPC, media buy, prepaid advertisement, etc, or look for the free traffic generating ways like SEO, article marketing, link exchange, etc. Whatever making money ideas you have, if you don’t succeed to get traffic, you will not make money in the internet – it is as simple as that.
In this article we will concentrate on one of the most popular and powerful traffic generators – SEO. In order to get traffic from the search engines, you need to select the right terms and make the onsite and offsite optimization for them. Keywords are the keys to the streams of traffic. Once you have the right keys you can boost your site with free and targeted visitors and make a lot of sales. Thus selecting the keywords is a very important step in the development of your internet business and making money on the net. You must have a careful and thoughtful approach to the queries selection.
The following mistakes are made by many webmasters selecting the queries for their SEO. We hope that you will learn to avoid them:
1. Keywords with general meaning. You will not succeed to rank high for the general terms because of the big competition on the web and as a result you will not get traffic. The goal for selecting keywords is getting as much quality traffic as possible.
2. What is the intent of your visitors? You need to ask yourself this question when you select the queries. Try to make your search phrases as specific as possible in order to get more targeted traffic. If for example your site is about the old cars, so selecting the keyword “cars” will rather be senseless, because searching for “cars” someone may mean: the most popular cars today, available brands of cars, history of cars, the best cars, the cheapest cars and what not.
“Cars” is a general word and has big competition thus your efforts of trying to rank high for the keyword “cars” will be hardly paid off.
3. Search phrases with the long tails. The intent behind the short term is usually very general thus the traffic coming from the short query is not targeted. If you ranked high for the short term you may get a lot of visitors but less conversion. Long-tail queries show what is in the mind of the searcher, thus they are more specific. For example such term as “buy an old car in New York” clearly shows the intent behind it. So if you are selling the old cars in New York, the traffic coming from such term is better for your making money online business than just “cars”.
Thus instead of ranking your site for the short queries with big competition that will bring you a lot of untargeted traffic, it makes more sense to optimize your site for easier to rank long tail terms that will generate you more targeted visitors and therefore will help you make quick money online.

