Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

SEO Follow Up: Increase Your Website Traffic

Increase Your Website traffic with Proven Link Building Methods

Do you want to increase the number of visitors to your website? Do you need more traffic from search engines? The first thing you’ll want to do is SEO, which stands for “Search Engine Optimization.”

Most companies that do business online have become keenly aware of the phrase “Search Engine Optimization.” This mysterious phrase means making sure your site contains the keywords and content that people are searching for. In other words, if my web page is about “web design,” I would make sure that when the search engines visit my page via search engine spider bots, that those bots can easily determine that the topic or theme of the page is “web design.”

In order for your site to receive relevant, targeted traffic, you want the search engines to know exactly what your site is about. But when it comes to traffic, herein lies the dilemma. If there are 7 million web pages about web design, and let’s say 1,000 of those have “optimized” their HTML and their content, how do the search engines determine which web pages out of this optimized 1000 should be in the top ten?

Here’s where off-site optimization comes into play, the second (and sometimes more important) thing you can do for your site. Most off-site optimization refers to links on other websites that lead people to your site. Search engine algorithms treat these links as a recommendation of your site. It’d be easy to say the more links you place on other sites the better, but it’s not that simple. When it comes to links, not all links are valued or weighed the same way. And the links that will move your site up in the search engine rankings the fastest are the ones that you want to target. Here’s what you need to “off-site optimize” your site.

First, determine what keywords should be used.

Doing research on your keywords is well worth your time, and should always been done before embarking on any SEO project.

When getting links, you want to go after the keyword phrases that will bring you the most targeted traffic. Each link back to your site is like a recommendation of your site. You want the keywords in the link to be keywords that you would like your site to be ranked for. For instance, if my site was about “web design,” I’d want the link back to me to have web design as the anchor text (the anchor text is the text in a link that takes you to another web page). If enough websites recommend my site as a “web design” site, the search engines are going to rank my website higher for that phrase.

Second, determine the best web pages to have your link on.

The most ideal web pages to have a link to your website would involve the following criteria:
1. An authority or trusted site. Ok, so what is an authority site? In my opinion a trusted site would be a site that has been around for a while, one that is “tried and true.” A trusted site would also have contact information readily available, either through a contact form or a phone number. Other things to look for in a trusted site would be things like a privacy policy, terms of service, FAQ pages, etc. Another thing that may make a site more trusted could be a blog, forum or other socially-interactive function. It would show that the site is alive and that users interact with it.

2. A site or web page that is related to your topic, theme or industry. This one is a little more obvious. If your site is about web design, a recommendation from someone in the same industry is going to be more helpful than links from unrelated websites. If I had the choice between a bunch of MySpace links or a link from a relevant website, I’d take the relevant website any day. However, keep in mind that your link should be placed on a related page, not necessarily just anywhere in the site. The site might contain information about different topics and your link could get lost among them.

3. A page that is indexed in the search engines. If the page your link is placed on is not indexed in the search engines, the search engines do not know it exists and you’ll never get the value out of it.. You can check for indexing by going to the search engine and typing the name of the site into the search box, like: “www.[insert name of site here].com” (without the quote or bracket marks).

Third, determine how your link should be treated.

Getting links from the right sites and with the right keywords won’t do much good on improving your search rankings unless your links are treated properly. As mentioned previously in this article, the page your link is placed on needs to be indexed in the search engines. If it is not you’ll never get any value from it. You also need to watch out for what is called a nofollow link. If the nofollow attribute is applied to your link it tells the search engines to not score or give value to your link. If you’re trying to move up in the search engines a nofollow on your link will not be much help. You also need to watch out for javascript redirects and other methods of taking away link value. Some of the methods used to take away link value are pretty sneaky, so you may need to ask an experienced SEO to determine the value of your links.

The final word.

When it comes to search engine optimization for the purpose of moving your site up in the organic search rankings, nothing is more important than getting links. But remember it’s not just links, it’s the right links from the right web pages with the right keyword phrases. And after all that, make sure the page it is on is indexed and the link does NOT have a nofollow on it.

About the Author

Adam Sorensen is the co-founder of LavaLinx. He has six years of experience in link building and internet marketing. He has worked for many large online companies including About.com and Logoworks.com.

Posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Computers, Internet, Marketing, Sales, Small Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.