The Secret To Getting Search Engine Traffic
Posted on : 06-09-2007 | By : Dave | In : Make Money Online
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It’s been 6 months since you started your site. You look at your analytics program and your search engine traffic has plateaued in the last 2 months. You can’t seem to grow your search engine traffic anymore.
You’ve submitted to all the quality directories you can think of. You’ve exchanged links with relevant sites. You’ve written articles for article directories. Link building has become tedious even boring. It seems like no one wants to link to you.
What’s your next move? What can you do to get more search engine traffic?
Rand Fishkin wrote an article that has been very helpful for me. He says the secret to getting more search engine traffic is to produce content that appeals to the link-savvy audience in your niche. He called this audience the Linkerati.
The Tale Of Two Audiences
To have long-term SEO success, you need to write for two audiences. Many online business people understand the importance of writing for your prospective customer audience. This audience makes up most of your visitors. However, the bulk of this audience doesn’t give out links. Most of the customer base don’t have websites and blogs where they can link to your site.
Herein lies the problem. SEO is 90% about building quality links. And who controls the links? The Linkerati. They are a much smaller group compared to the customer base, but they control most of the links. Check out this graphic I found on SEO Moz.
If you don’t write for the Linkerati, your link building efforts will be much harder. You’ll be building links one by one. You’ll have to break your budget with paid links. Instead, you should target the Linkerati by producing content they would like and then marketing it to them.
By writing with them in mind, you’ll have a steady stream of inbound links. The Linkerati will become repeat visitors because they like your content. And they will link to you as long as you continue producing content that appeals to them.
What kind of content does the Linkerati like?
Visit their sites and see what they’re linking to. Then, produce similar content and promote it to them.
Source: The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (that’s really no secret at all)
This is true but another way would be to just keep creating good quality fresh content. Every new peice of content is another opportunity to not only get search engine traffic but to also attract links. I think you can spend too much time trying to market your existing work – keep pumping out the fresh content too.
I agree 100% with you. Writing fresh and useful content is a great way to attract search engines, and the best part of it is that it doesn’t require marketing. I experiment with different types of websites and blogs, and I have found that the ones I create a lot of fresh original content for are the ones that consistently show up in the search engines. I have had great results with no marketing, but that takes time and work because I have to do research and spend time making sure my writing is interesting and makes my readers come back. And a lot of my readers end up mentioning my posts in forums and such, and I get links even without working for them.
But I do agree with Dee that if you’re looking to aggresively link build you need to have a strategy that appeals to the Linkerati.
But who are the Linkerati? Or perhaps a better question, since they’d be different for each niche, is how do I find the Linkerati for my niche?
[...] The Secret to Getting Search Engine Traffic - from Net Business Blog [...]
Content and marketing do go hand in hand. You have to do both.
My point in the post was that you have to write for the Linkerati. There is a lot of quality content that is not necessarily attractive to the Linkerati. Also, most of the time they won’t know about your content unless you promote the it to them.
Thanks for your in-depth comments. They make me think :)
I have a couple questions.
When you start a new site, how do people find your site without marketing? If it’s through the search engines, how do you rank without actively building links? In my experience, most new sites get very low search traffic unless they get a lot of links.
Do you crosslink between your sites? Are you in very low-competition niches?
Great questions. I’ll have to do a future post answering them.
[...] you have many links, you’ll rank well on Google. The Linkerati, or the people that give out links, use Google often. Guess who they will be linking to. The sites [...]
[...] you have many links, you’ll rank well on Google. The Linkerati, or the people that give out links, use Google often. Guess who they will be linking to. The sites [...]
What if you have many web links and don’t rank well, Something is going on besides just your link popularity that affects your traffic..