Traffic is the soul to any website, especially if you plan to receive profit from it. Search Engine Optimization, short for SEO, is only one of many ways to receive traffic (visitors) to your website.
Is SEO mandatory for all business websites?
That is a very debatable question.
The truth is, there are many others out there who are making decent income streams from their web properties by utilizing many other different methods of traffic generation. Therefore, in my opinion, SEO is not mandatory. But it wouldn't hurt to have all the traffic generation strategies executed in parallel, would it?
Immediate Results with SEO? Yes and No
After all, SEO is not a short term process. Well, SEO can deliver results very quickly but at certain risks. A lot of people utilize what we call "black hat" SEO techniques to obtain results very quickly. But you see, in the world of SEO, Google (currently) is the King and Yahoo / MSN are the Queens. These three search engines make up the majority of the search market in many continents.
So if you live in Canada or United States, I suggest you try your best to please Google, Yahoo, and MSN. And you know what, they don't like to be manipulated; they weren't designed to be manipulated otherwise they would be absolutely useless. Imagine doing a search on Google for, say, business, and all you find is a list of adult sites. I would walk away from Google and never use it if that ever happens.
We, as users of these search engines, are their "customers". Google runs its search engine as a business and they take it very seriously; they will try their best to penalize people who are trying to manipulate Google in order to ensure the rest of us to have pleasant experience while using their services.
In short, I'm absolutely against black hat techniques. You should never put your websites at risk as well.
On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
Search Engine Optimization can be categorized into two parts. On-Page SEO is all about optimizing the structure of your website and Off-Page SEO is all about link building. On-Page SEO is like the tip of an iceberg. Which means you should actually be spending a good portion of your time on Off-Page SEO.
For information related to On-Page SEO, check out:
Off-Page SEO - Link Building and Link Baiting
Off-Page SEO can be further divided down into two parts: Link Building and Link Baiting.
- Link Building refers to the action of manually getting links to your website by participating in forums, blogs, article directories, social media profiles...etc.
- Link Baiting refers to the action of "baiting" other webmasters to link to useful resource or information on your website.
These are both effective strategies, if executed properly, to obtain back links.
Link Baiting
What I like about link baiting is that it's passive. When you have something that's valuable to others, people will be compelled to link to you. So these "valuable resources" on your page are "baiting" your visitors to link to them, constantly, even when you are asleep. Link Baiting is not easy, and creating link bait content is different from niche to niche. So to come up with effective link baits, you need a lot of creative juice.
Ask yourself this question, the Internet is filled with information and resource, why should yours be the ones they must link to?
This post is a link bait. Well, at least I'm trying to make it one :)
Link Building
People go out there and hunt for links all the time; they comment on blogs, participate on forums, submit to link and article directories, and create social media profile pages.
However, many of them are NOT being effective! You see, the most important thing about back links is that you want to make sure they pass SEO value to your website.
3 Simple and Major Mistakes People Make:
- They are not aiming for do-follow links
- They are not utilizing anchor text
- They are flagged as spammers
Do-Follow Back Links
Firefox has an extension plug-in that shows if the links on a page are do-follow or no-follow. This tool is very useful and all link builders should have it installed.
I'm not saying you should only participate on do-follow blogs, forums...etc. A lot of high traffic blogs and forums out there are not do-follow but they can also bring you a huge chunk of traffic. But from SEO and Search Engine Ranking perspective, only do-follow links count in SERP.
Anchor Text
Anchor Text is an important factor in determining the SERP of your website for the search terms (keywords) that you are trying to optimize for. For example, if you want to rank high for the search term "Internet Business", you need to have as many do-follow links to your website with the following link structure:
<a href="http://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME">Internet Business</a>
It would be ideal if the same keywords are also in your domain URL. Which is why you need a good keyword-targeted domain name in the first place.
Spammers
When you spend time building links, you want to make sure that you actually get them. Here is a list of tips for you to follow:
- When you comment on blogs, make sure that your comment is relevant and adds "value" to the blog post.
- Many do-follow blogs have comment moderation enabled to prevent spam. Observe how others are getting their comments approved.
- When you participate on forums, make sure that your comment is also relevant and adds "value" to the forum post. Do not spam your footer with links.
- When you submit articles to article directories, make sure the articles are unique. On-Page SEO techniques should also be applied to the article header, content...etc.
- Don't rush with link building. 1000 links a day may very well raise the red flag on Google's end. (Although no one really knows how Google works, well, unless you work for Google)
Aaron
SEO Entrepreneur
P.S. Yes I know, SEO is a highly talked about topic. But I hope you'll find this one useful.
Appendix
What is a Do-Follow Website?
A Do-Follow website is a website that does not have "no-follow" tags added to its outbound / external links.
A blog is a do-follow blog is you can:
- Submit comments with do-follow link to your website attached to your name.
- Submit comments with do-follow links to your website within the content part of the comments. (Some blogs put "no-follow" tags on commenter name but not the comment itself)
- Have a do-follow link to your website in your profile on the blog.
A forum is a do-follow forum if you can:
- Attach do-follow links to your website in your signature.
- Submit posts with do-follow links to your website within the content part of the posts.
- Have a do-follow link to your website in your profile on the forum.
An article directory is a do-follow if you can:
- Attach do-follow links to your website in your author signature.
- Submit articles with do-follow links to your website within the content part of the articles.
- Have a do-follow link to your website in your profile.
Some social media websites also allow do-follow links in user profiles.
Glossary
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the act of optimizing a website to rank high for targeted keywords (search terms) for search engines.
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page) [self explanatory]
- Anchor Text refers to the following part of a link: <a href="http://www.domain-name.com">Anchor Text</a>
- Back Links refers to the links pointing back at your website. (One-Way)
- On-Page SEO refers to the techniques used to optimize the structure of a web page from search engine perspective.
- Off-Page SEO refers to the techniques used to increase the number of back links linking to a website.
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