The last post Organic Traffic Sells Websites, touched a bit on the importance of organic traffic when it comes to marketing your blog. Today, I’d like to spend some time talking a bit about SEO, and how to start getting streams of organic traffic coming to your blog day after day. The best part about organic traffic is the fact that it’s semi-passive. It’s one of the few methods that allows you to reap benefits months, or even years later. I have another blog that is getting about 90% organic traffic. This is a blog that covers a very niche topic, and it’s not my best work by far. In fact, the content is all re-written PLR (private label rights), and I utilized an article re-writer in order to avoid duplicate content. It’s truly set, and forget… I haven’t touched this thing in months, yet like clockwork, I see about $3-$5 a day from it.

That’s the beauty of organic traffic. But how do we capture this ever-elusive organic traffic? Well, that could be a book in and of itself… and there are actually several books on the subject. I could go on for days about how to do it, but let’s start with something everyone knows… SEO IS ALL ABOUT BUILDING LINKS.

Sadly, building links is one of the most tedious and boring jobs that a web publisher or a blog flipper will ever have to accomplish. But it’s a necessary evil, and it’ll pay off in the long run. It doesn’t matter whether your blog or website is a quick flip, or something you plan on keeping a little longer term… it needs links. People won’t buy the site without SOME organic traffic, and in order to do that, you’ll need a few links here and there. Don’t get me wrong… I’ve had sites that started generating organic traffic and didn’t have ANY links… but that’s purely by accident. If you want to build organic traffic, you’ll need to get those links. On the subject of blog flipping, look at it this way… one of the factors of valuation when buying a blog is incoming links. So the more you can generate incoming links, the better you can cash out for!

Google & Link Weight

One simple fact can’t be disputed. The biggest part of the complicated Google Search Engine Algorithm is linkage data. Google views the site with the most trusted links as the most important. That’s not a secret. There are many other considerations, but generally if you build enough links, you’ll rank higher than the guy in front of you.

But wait… did you know that the number of links a site has, has very little to do with search engine results? That’s because one of the things that most people forget about when building a link is that every link is not created equal. Google likes sites with “trusted” links, and these types of links carry more importance than a blogroll link from Aunt Maple’s Knitting Blog.

So what else does Google look for when deciding how high to place your site in their search engine results?

• Trust Factor of Incoming Links - Like I said above, one link from a “trusted” site can be worth more than dozens of links from smaller sites. For example, one link on Problogger.Net, can be worth 10x as much as a link on JohnChow.Com, even though they see similar traffic numbers. Problogger has a Google PageRank of 6, and John Chow is lucky that Google still allows him to run a blog. He’s been kicked around by Google so many times it’s not even funny. But long story short, the higher the PageRank of a site that’s linking to you, the more “trusted” the link is from Google. Get those high PageRank links!
• Number of Outbound Links - Even if a site has a high PageRank, if the site is linking to EVERYBODY, it’s not as important as a site that selectively uses outbound linking. For example, a link in a directory (except for trusted directories like DMOZ), is worth very little, no matter what the PageRank of the site is. Directories are great for building massive quantities of links, but they don’t carry much weight individually.
• Anchor Text - This might just be the most important thing when it comes to ranking highly on a keyword. However, generally you don’t have any control over this. Make it quite clear what words you are trying to rank for, and most people will link to you with that anchor text. For example, if I wanted to rank for the terms, Blog Flipping, and Website Flipping, I’d need to build links using those two phrases as anchor text. So if you wanna link to me… *nudge*. When manually building links (commenting on Do-Follow blogs, etc.), you can use whatever anchor text you want, so make sure to take advantage of this.

When building links, I don’t recommend that you worry about anything but getting links, and using the correct anchor text. The above examples were just shown so that you know some of the factors that Google uses to decide what site goes where. And just for clarification, these aren’t SEO tips per se, but just an overall guideline of how Google decides which links are important. When it comes to SEO, I’ve got a ton of tips, but I just wanted to share with you how Google decides which links are important, and which ones are junk. Stick around and we’ll discuss some on-page, and off-page SEO tips in future articles. But for now, get out there and start building links. Whether you know what you are doing or not… links can only HELP your blog.

We’ll have more great SEO tips for you coming soon. Make sure to check back often!