Building Backlinks That Will Generate Traffic!

How To Build Backlinks That Will Generate Traffic!

Building Backlinks

There’s no doubt that link building is an important part of SEO. Inbound links are what help convey trust to the search engines and improve a search engine presence. However, you never want to focus too much on the search engines when it comes to link building. After all, the search engines are simply robots. Building links just to build links in the hopes that they get noticed by the search spiders is the wrong approach. Instead, it’s important to make your target audience the priority when it comes to link building. After all, the goal of any internet marketing activity is to get someone to visit your site and convert. Building links on obscure sites may build up your link portfolio, but they aren’t going to result in any direct traffic.

Focusing too much on link volume for the search engines can result in bad decisions. Sure, there are plenty of ways to build links and build them quickly. This approach may even give you a boost in ranking for a short period of time. However, the search engines are becoming more and more advanced. The Google Penguin update was a game changer as it went after sites that were guilty of link spam tactics like building links from low quality sites, link exchanges, overuse of exact match anchor text, and more. Building links only for the search engines will have the opposite effect and aren’t worth building at all.

Links that are built purely for SEO purposes often miss the mark when it comes to traffic generation. The links that are included on many popular sites (including social networking sites) are typically “no-follow”. This code tells the search engine spider not to follow the link, or essentially not to pass any value over to the site that is being linked to. At first glance, “no follow” links appear to be a real bummer. What’s the point of getting this great link if the search engines aren’t paying any attention to it?

There are actually two reasons to try and attain these no follow links. The first is to generate traffic. Even if the search engine spider isn’t following the link it still looks the same to a human visitor. They can still see the link and they can still choose to click over to the site. Popular sites like YouTube and LinkedIn utilize the “no follow” tag to avoid an abundance of link spam but these sites can be great at generating traffic to your site. It would be crazy to avoid creating and sharing great videos on YouTube or answering questions or joining groups on LinkedIn for exposure just because any link that you are able to put on those sites are not followed by the search engine spiders. Think about the amount of traffic that those sites get on a daily basis.

The second reason is that it’s not actually true that no follow links have no SEO value. The search engines may not “follow” the link but they are still seeing it. The search engines like to see a well rounded link portfolio. If all of the links pointing to your site are followed links, it could raise a red flag. A combination of followed links and no follow links shows that you are building links for the right reasons, to gain exposure and generate traffic to your site from target audience members.

Doug Thaler is an expert on Customer Acquisitions and online digital marketing. Contact Doug at 888.410.9690 x225.