Thread: How to Get More Traffic

I want to talk about backlinks and why it's important not just to build backlinks but to get them from many different sources. Anybody who's been doing any SEO work at all on their website knows that getting good backlinks is a real pain in the butt. The question is why we do it.

Quite simply, for the foreseeable future Google, Yahoo, Bing use backlinks to determine not just the popularity but the authority status of your website. Now there are some who say that link popularity will be devalued by the search engines in favor of some other type of algorithm. It's my opinion based on my experiences that until we see a major shift in the HTTP protocols that backlinks will continue to be the way search engines rank websites.

Does this mean that backlinks are the only thing that counts? Absolutely not, if you do not have your pages optimized then even though you are building plenty of backlinks you will still have problems ranking.

Back to backlinks, in the beginning it was easy to get your website ranked high in the search engines. All you had to do was load up your pages with the keywords you target. The search engines would come through a spider your page see all the keywords and determine what that page was relevant for those keywords.

Over the years the search engines (Google in particular) develop ways to figure this out. You see they want to give the end-user's exactly what they're searching for. So instead of showing spammy pages that were loaded with keywords and no content they developed algorithms to sort through all the garbage.

In the meantime they needed a way to rank websites. The best way for them to tell if a website was popular was and still is the number of links pointing back to the site. You see Google views backlinks as a sort of popularity contest. That means that whoever has the most backlinks has the most popular website. Now that's a very simplistic look at what this basically how they rank sites.

Fast forward a couple years and now you have people who've learned how to manipulate the system. So now you have everybody and their brother out there trying to sell you some form of back link system. People started creating link farms, reciprocal linking co-op's, and they even got so creative as to develop three-way linking schemes.

Google looks at this and says there is got to be away to determine who is providing good content and who is just trying to trick the system. So they spent millions of dollars to develop algorithms that could detect people who are trying to spam the system.

Over the past couple of years Google has become very advanced and how they deal with backlink spamming. Basically what happens is that Google looks where the links are coming from and then tries to determine if it is from a trusted website and it is Google places more value and emphasis on that link. If Google cannot determine that the back link came from a trusted site then they devalue that link. So how does Google determine if the site should be trusted or not, basically those sites and links are verified by user data, how old the website is, and other factors that are difficult to spoof.

Here are a few tips to build good backlinks to your site.

First of foremost provide good content

Make sure your content is written in a language that your target readers will understand.

Submit your site to DMOZ

Submit your site to pay directors. Just remember quality counts

Distribute your article through article sites, EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

Submit a press release to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

Trade articles with other webmasters.

If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds people will see your site, and potentially link to it.

Join the Better Business Bureau.

Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources

Answer questions on Yahoo answers and Google groups

Create a Squidoo Lens

Submit you page to Technorati, these tagged pages rank well in Yahoo and MSN

Create and submit short videos to the various video directories.

List your blog in a few of the best blog directories.

This list could go on and on but I think you get the idea. The more places your site as seen the more popular it will become. Why do you think politicians spend so much money to get on TV....

The good thing about working to get backlinks, a lot of the sites linking back to you will also send you traffic.

To close this I want to still a paragraph from SEOBook "The fundamental base of the internet is not the page, but the link"