It is said that traffic is the lifeblood of your business in Internet Marketing. And that is true. Every Internet marketer could do with more traffic. As covered in the last two parts of this series, there are paid methods and there are free methods to generate traffic. The basic difference between them is that paid methods generally produce faster and more targeted results whereas free methods tend to produce slower results and sometimes less targeted ones. So the key to using free methods effectively is to make them as targeted as possible.
That is where your keyword research comes in. Remember the long tail keywords you have compiled in the previous parts of this series? These long tail keywords ensure that only people searching for those particular things are going to click on your links. That brings up the most important essence of all free traffic generations methods – Links.
All free generation methods can be boiled down to one basic activity – putting links in strategic websites. The more links you have in these strategic websites pointing back to your website, the better it is. This is what Internet marketers call ‘link juice’ or ‘link love’. When the search engines find a link on another website pointing to yours, it counts it as a ‘vote’ for your website, indicating that your website is important in the eyes of the other website. The more links (or ‘votes’) you get from other websites, the more important your website is and the higher it ranks in the search engines. The ultimate aim of all free traffic generation methods is to get your website ranked number one (the first listed website on page One of the SERP) or at least be listed on the first page of the SERP for any particular keyword.
But there is a word of caution. The search engines frown upon a website that gets a huge surge of links pointing to itself all of a sudden (like a hundred in a day). The reason is that it does not appear natural. There are certain legitimate occasions when this might happen, for example a big media event that highlights one website and every news portal, fan’s website and social media site points to it all on the same day. In such a case, the search engines will push that website on to page One for a few days and then when the buzz over that website dies down (and no new links are pointing to it), then it is removed from page One. That is not what you’d like to see happening to your website.
To avoid that, you need to build up the number of links pointing to your website naturally. ‘Naturally’ to the search engines means two things – a gradual buildup of links over time and links using different anchor texts pointing to your site. Of course it is still important to use your long tail keyword as the anchor text but you should also drop links with other related terms about 30% of the time. For instance, if your long tail keyword is ‘fast treatment for head lice’, then related terms may be ‘head lice cure’, ‘treating head lice’ or ‘head lice remedy’. You may even use very general terms like ‘click here’ or the raw URL of your website.
In terms of how to drop links, there are literally hundreds of ways. And that will be the topic of the next article.