There are one of three ways people can get to your website:
1) Using a search engine to look up some term(s) Ex: Google, Bing, Yahoo
2) Referral websites (sites linking back to yours) Ex: A link to your site is posted on Facebook or your local Chamber’s website
3) Direct traffic (this is people typing in or clicking on a link to your site directly)
The top ten referral links on this website for this month. Some are social media websites, some are blogs, and some are search engines.
If you want to read a post about search engines, check out this one. You can also look at everything tagged ‘seo’ on this site.
SEO (search engine optimization) is a combination of techniques that lead more people to find your site on search engines. I actually kind of hate the phrase (it conjures up for me the internet equivalent of sketchy used car salesman) but I am forced to use it because 1) people care about it and 2) what I do for clients actually does help them do better in search engines.
Is it magic? Not really. While reaching the summit of a mountain might seem magical, most of the work involves preparing and the climb to get there.
Is it hard? Not really. It’s more of a consistent targeted effort 1) get more content on your website and 2) to get more links coming into your site.
How do you create more content (part 1)? This is where a blog can come in. This blog post is that other part of SEO (part 2): link building.
More links
Let’s say Website A has 10 links coming into it from other sites, and Website B has 1000. All other things seeming equal, which one will seem to do better?
How do you get links coming into your site? First, understand who is already linking. You can use Google Analytics for this or you can go to Google.com and type in “link:yoursite.com” and see everything linking to it.
How do you get more links? My website can give you some clues:
1) Use social media and share your website on it.
2) Network with other bloggers (it helps to blog yourself). You can offer to do a guest post on their blog for example, which would give you a link back to your website.
3) Get any ‘free’ links you can, like a Bing Local listing for your business or a listing on that vendor’s website you buy $10,000 worth of product from every year.
4) Take advantage of the press and get links from their websites. You want the link and they are an (ideally) credible website to get a link from.
Crap That’s Stopped Working
These are the things that people used to do to build links. Some of these actually worked for awhile, some have always been ‘illegal’:
1) Write generic articles and post them places like EZArticles with a link back to their site.
2) Write one article and ‘spin’ it so it seemed different enough. Then post it a bunch of places.
3) Buying links or joining ‘link farms’.
People who work at search engines (and the search engines themselves) are smarter than this. This doesn’t work anymore. Links from these generic sources aren’t worth much, spinning will mark you as a content spammer, and buying links will get you blacklisted on Google.
Don’t believe me? SEOMoz and others smarter than myself can back me up.
So if you are looking for the website link building equivalent of lap band surgery, I’m sorry to say that in my world at least, it doesn’t exist. You’ll have to grab your sneakers and hit the gym like everyone else.
As you probably realize, a lot of ‘link building’ can be accomplished with blogging and using social media effectively over time. Oh and asking for links from people you have actual relationships with.
So check out your link situation now, trying building links for six months then do it again. At a certain point, links will just start multiplying on their own. (I’ve got over 3,000 coming into Breaking Even and I can tell you less than two years ago, it was half that amount… in other words, momentum can build once you get going!).