subject: How To Make A Web Site Work For Itself - Some Less Knows Seo Techniques [print this page] Everybody who has to deal with SEO knows the importance of backlinks. Without a sufficiently high number of backlinks it is almost impossible to get high ranking in Google and other search engines. But at the same time, link building is the most time-consuming part of the SEO process. We are now going to describe some link building techniques which work on their own - you just need to make a start and then backlinks to your site will be created over time without you doing anything. We are also going to describe some other techniques, apart from link building, which will bring you more visitors and, most important, more customers.
The most efficient way for link building is through article distribution. Many already know that but for those who do not the argument is very simple. Instead of just asking a web master to include a link to your site, you write an article which is interesting and will attract visitors, so that web masters will want to put it on their sites. In return, they will link to your site from within the article. There are also automated article distribution systems, which allow you to easily publish your article on hundreds of web sites. That can save you months of work which you would have to do by submitting to all those sites manually. Such automated services, of course, cost money, although normally not much. But here we will talk about what you can do absolutely free using your own web site.
Publishing articles on your own web site can help you in two ways. Firstly, being an expert in your industry, you can write useful and interesting articles which will attract a lot of readers. Among them some may be web masters so, if they are interested, they may link to you then. The more interesting and useful the article is the more backlinks you will get. Do not forget to include also two buttons on each article's page: a social bookmarking button (like AddThis or AddToAny) and a "Tell a friend" button. Then even those visitors who are not web masters may bookmark your articles on social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook and others and may send the link to their friends. In the beginning the effect will be slow, however, as the links gradually build up, more people will be visiting the page, so the link building will be speeding up by itself. So you just need to write an article and then it will be working for you without you doing anything else. It all depends on how good your article is, so try to write such articles which will generate a lot of interest.
Another approach is to write articles optimized for a particular keyword or key phrase for which competition is not very strong. Suppose you are selling cars. It makes no sense trying to compete for such keywords like "car" or "Ford" and the like because the competition is too high and you will never be able to come up to the first pages on Google. But you may try something like "car repair" or "how to repair your car yourself'. Competition for such phrases is much lower whereas the search volume, although lower, is still sufficiently high to bring you traffic. To find best key phrases, you may use Keyword Tool in Google Adwords (you do not need to pay for that, just subscribe to Adwords and pause your first campaign immediately after creating it, then you will not be charged). In Keyword Tool, type e.g. "car" and see the suggestions. For each suggested keyword (key phrase) you will see the monthly search amount so you can choose among those which are searched frequently enough. Then google this key phrase and take a look at, e.g., site number 10. You can check its PageRank and also find the number of backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer. That will give you an idea if you can go into competition with that site or not. You may also like to check site number 20, but going further back doesn't make much sense as very few people look beyond the second page in the search results. Thus you will find some key phrases which are searched frequently enough and at the same time the competition for which is not very high, then you can write articles optimized for those phrases. Of course, if your article is interesting, it will also generate backlinks as we have described above.
Finally, let us speak about a different technique which we will call Visitor Optimization. One may say that SEO and visitor optimization are essentially the same because a site with content optimized for visitors is also usually well optimized for search engines. But we are going to speak about something else here. The thing is that not all visitors (in fact, very few of them) eventually become customers. And the reason is not because your site is not good but simply because they may be not ready to buy when they visit your site. As Clate Mask writes in his book, "People buy when THEY are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell." Although they are interested in your product (that is why they visit your site) they may be ready to buy only in a month or maybe in a year. So, what you need to do, try to make them come back to your site again and again. Just include a section which will attract their interest and which is updated regularly, so that each time they can find something new. A good idea is to make a page containing news or useful tips. That will actually help you kill two birds with one stone because frequently updated sites are ranked much higher by Google. Of course, also don't forget to include social bookmarking and "Tell a friend" buttons on your news or tips page. Then you will generate higher traffic of both new and return visitors, which will eventually result in more sales.
Thus using these three simple techniques you can make your site work for itself increasing its own popularity, which will result in higher traffic and eventually higher sales.
