A whole lot of books that could be summed up in 10 pages...
Since the site itself is now up and operational, I’ve been spending my time trying to generate traffic. If you’ve never tried to generate traffic to a site, here’s a brief tutorial.
Search Traffic
Search traffic is made up of people who searched for some term and were then sent to your site by the search engine they used. These people don’t know your site, they just know the search engine told them it was a good place to go. By the way, I say search engine but I mean Google. If you’re optimizing for search engine traffic, you’re optimizing for Google. By the way, the official term is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). How do you do SEO? Easy!
Your goal is to get your site to the top of the ranking for your key words. For Diamonds or Dogs, those key words are “gifts”, “gift ideas”, “Gifts for men” and so on. I would like Diamonds or Dogs to show up at the top of the rankings for these key words because most people focus only on the top search results. In fact, repeated studies have shown that the top 3 results get the overwhelming majority of traffic with the top 1 result having a huge advantage.
How Does Google Work?
Now Google has a complex algorithm which tries to figure out how good your website is for certain key words. It won’t divulge this algorithm to anyone because they don’t want people to know how to game the system, but we do know some generalities.
Key Words
Google looks for specific key words and phrases. So for example, if a searcher searched for “gift ideas for women over 50″ and one of my posts on Diamonds or Dogs had that phrase in it, that would be a good indicator to Google that this post was a good result for this phrase. Supposedly, Google values text in the heading more than text in the body. So if my post had “gift ideas for women over 50″ in the title, that’s better than a post that had “gifts ideas for women over 50″ in the body. By the way, did you notice how this post is titled? That’s because a lot of people type questions into Google and this post is optimized to take advantage of that.
There’s other ways to tell Google about what’s in the content, like the actual link text (that’s why my post links have the actual titles in them instead of just “p45″) metatags and so on. In general though, this all comes down to showing Google that your content matches the search query.
Back links
The second (and in my opinion, much more important) way in which Google measures the quality of your page is by how many people link to it and how. What does this mean? Well, Google tracks people who link to your site and the anchor text they use.
Anchor text by the way is that text under which the link exists. Most link on the internet don’t just look like this: http://www.diamondsordogs.com. They usually look like this: Diamonds or Dogs, Gift Idea For Men And Women. In this case the link itself is still http://www.diamondsordogs.com but the anchor text is “diamonds or dogs, gifts idea for men and women”. So Google tries to see how many people link to various pages of mine and what anchor text they use in order to measure what other people think my site is all about.
P.S. Google apparently also looks at the words around your link.
So if 100 people link to my site and use anchor texts with variations of gifts, ideas, gift ideas and so on, that’s much better than 100 people just linking to my site with a generic diamonds or dogs. The more people link back to my pages and the better the anchor text is, the better I look to Google. By the way, Google also cares about what kind of people are linking back to me. So 100 links from no name domains who no one has ever heard about are not worth nearly as much as 10 quality links from domains like the New York Times, Tech Crunch and so on. In other words, Google figures out how good my content is by checking to see how many people are talking about my content, what they’re saying about my content and how important these people are. Think of Google as a high school clique trying to figure out how cool the new kid is by listening how many other kids are talking about them, how important these kids who are talking and what these kids are saying.
Got it? Good. So how do I generate quality links to my site?
Generating Back Links
There are some less than savory ways of doing this, such as paying other people to link to you, but I really believe that using “bad” SEO like this will eventually bite you in the ass. In other words, don’t do it, you’ll end up regretting it. Instead, I do two things:
Guest Posting
This means I talk to other blogs or sites and I offer them free content that I create for them to use on their site. This content needs to be of high quality and it needs to match the content that the target site offers. It also needs to talk about my own content. So if I was trying to guest post on a history blog, I would pitch them a guest story about famous gifts throughout history. By the way, these guest posts also generate direct traffic but we’ll talk about that one in the next post.
Here’s an example of a guest post I did for A Simple Marriage last week. Unfortunately, Corey edited my byline a bit at the end of the post and it no longer contains good anchor text, but hey, it’s better than nothing. Remember, these people are doing a favor for me and I should show my gratitude by providing them with quality content. I appreciate the fact that Corey gave me this opportunity.
On a little side rant, as a blog owner, I get pitches for guest posts all the time and they suck. People want to give me a 200 word post that’s 100% fluff and expect me to link back to their site. No thank you. I put a lot of time and effort into my guest posts because I want to make a good impression on my hosts and their readers and I expect the same for people trying to pitch me a guest post.
Link Exchanges
This means you’re offering someone a link from your own site in exchange for one from theirs. These are ok but I prefer to only do them when the target site has content relevant to my own. For example, if I did a link exchange from Equally Happy, I would look for other sites in the self improvement or related spaces. I wouldn’t do an exchange with a “learn how to speak spanish” site because that’s not really relevant. Yes, I would still gain an SEO benefit from the link exchange, even with an irrelevant site, but again, I think it’s dishonest to do that.
So there you have it, a very quick primer to generating search traffic. Next post will talk about generating direct traffic.
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So if you’re trying to help me by spreading the word about Diamonds or Dogs, do it by putting a link on your site or blog that says Diamonds or Dogs, the best place to find gift ideas for men and women, or something along those lines. However, please only do so if you actually like the site. I have no desire to game the system and I don’t need dishonest help.