by Stephan Miller
Every day you want to wake up to a thousand more hits than the next. It doesn't matter if you are selling something or are just writing a blog. You want traffic. Why have a website if you can't get visitors?
But it doesn't matter how valuable your content is. It doesn't matter if you created the greatest thing since sliced bread and you're selling it exclusively from your website. No one will find you if you don't reach out. And how do you reach out? With links.
In the brick and mortar world, a retail business depends on demand and location. If you put a store selling something that somebody wants in a high traffic location, you will be successful. And sometimes it doesn't matter if your price is a little bit higher than everyone else's. Look at convenience stores that set their prices twice as high as any grocery store. So they make a profit? You bet they do.
Now if we use this model for an website, location can be compared to your search engine rankings. The higher you rank for your chosen keywords, the more people come to your store. If you provide something that your visitors want, valuable content, they may buy something or they may just remember your site and be back for more.
Getting people to link to your site is one way to increase your ranking with the search engines. But a lot of people go about this the wrong way. By posting to free for all links pages, spamming blog comments, or worse. I had a blog that got about 10 comments a day from people that were just trying to get a link to their site. The site was a family photo blog. It was an easy target, but do you think that anyone looking at a picture of my family wanted to click on the Cialis website link in the comments?
Well, search engines don't think so either. Links like this are being downgraded in many search engines, including Google. It's a good thing. And this brings us back to valuable content.
Valuable content will convince people to link to you. Did you know that most blogging software can put a "blog this" link on Internet Explorer's toolbar? This button puts a link to your site right from their blog. And once your site gets into the blogosphere, there's no telling where is will stop. Maybe with top rankings for keywords you never optimized for, but that fit your site perfectly.
Did you know that there are site rating groups like stumbleupon.com that can send your site to thousands of people within a week? If people like your content they will pass it on to other users. You could have 500 people linking to you by the end of the week.
What about the "Link to Us" page? I know. I thought it was "old school" too. Until I tried it. It works. Just give your visitors the code they need to copy and paste to their site. Make it easier for them and they'll link to you.
Linking membership sites are great also, especially when you get hundreds of requests for link exchanges because of the caliber of your content.
Yes, things are changing with search engines. But if you have been providing the type of content that people look for, you have nothing to worry about.
Stephan Miller http://www.stephanmiller.com
# posted by Priya Shah @ 1:41 PM
