Search Engine Traffic

From time to time I come across those website owners who want to get search engine traffic “naturally”.  Does this mean that they want to build a website and sit back and wait for it to attract visitors based purely upon their stellar content, and not build any backlinks to it?  This is a recipe for disaster, and a website owner will be waiting for a long time if they just wait for their site to get popular.  It will never raise in the rankings!  It would take months to get indexed, and then how would it ever get found anyway, unless it was the only website of its kind and there was significant search volume for the keyword(s)?  But, that is a very unlikely scenario.

To attract visitors to a website, you’d be very hard pressed to make any headway without some self promotion.  Yes, you’re living in a fantasy land if you think you’ll get search engine traffic “naturally”.  It’s like opening a business and hoping to get customers, while keeping it a secret at the same time.  You are contradicting yourself.  When anyone opens up a brick and mortar business, one of the first things they do after getting situated is advertise.  It should be no different with a website.

Since there is only so much you can do as far as on page optimization goes — although DO NOT overlook this critical task — you must build backlinks to your website.  It’s still the most important part of Google’s algorithm, and you absolutely can’t overlook it!  If you don’t believe me, do your on site SEO and wait.. and wait some more for other website owners to “naturally” backlink to your site.

Once you realize that to get search engine traffic you have to be proactive, you’ll also note that your competitors, those that are already in coveted positions on page one of Google, have also been busy getting their own backlinks and they have a head start on you.  You’ll need to have a very aggressive backlink-building campaign to catch up.  And you’re not looking for sheer numbers of backlinks.  You need to get high volumes of high PR backlinks.  A free way to do this is to analyze your competitors’ backlinks through SEO Spyglass, which is a much better resource, and shows more backlinks than Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

If you get confused about the difference between White Hat methods and Black Hat methods, and which to avoid in your backlink building efforts to get traffic, just remember the general guideline that Black Hat methods are those which aren’t sustainable over time.  Is it Black Hat to buy a link?  Think of it in terms of advertising again — is it wrong to advertise?  Why would it be wrong to buy advertising; isn’t that what you are doing with pay-per-click?  My philosophy on backlinking and search engine optimization for search engine traffic is this: Google directly or indirectly gives website owners reason to aggressively backlink.  If you are willing to work harder/smarter than the competition, you are probably not only a “relevant” search result, but you also deserve to be found high in the SERP.  So, go for it!  And may you be blessed with an abundance of traffic.