Link Building Or Traffic Building – Whats More Important?
That may sound like a dumb question but when you speak to some webmasters you would swear that link building was the only thing. The problem with concentrating on link building is that it is kind of like putting all your eggs in one basket – and right now, that basket is about to fall off the shelf.
In reality, you cannot separate the two. Traffic building is the name of the game – link building is just a means to an end. However, for those that concentrate all their efforts on link building, you may find that as a search engine optimisation tool, its days are numbered.
Links have been seen as a vote of confidence in a page’s authority. There are many SEO specialists who are now starting to look at the visitor as being the vote of confidence. When you take a realistic look at the situation, web content is created for the visitor so it makes sense that they have some say in whether or not a page has any authority.
It has been happening for a while anyway. If a user has found your page through the search results and found it wanting, they will click away fairly quickly. A webmasters worst enemy is the back button – if that is used too quickly then search engines like Google take this to represent a vote against the site. Get enough visitors doing the back button dance and you will see those pages drop in the search results fairly quickly.
Google is one search engine that is possibly smart enough now to analyze a page’s worth based purely on visitor habits. Hitting the back button or closing the tab is one statistic. Others include how long the visitor has stayed on that page; have they clicked through to any other pages or perhaps clicked through to another site through a link (this includes ads).
The sum total of all this activity will, over time, create a very accurate ‘bounce factor’ for each page. This will not necessarily be a simple formula. The variables that make up the formula could include where the visitor came from, e.g. social media, search engine, advertising, or an external link.
As your visitors’ habits take over in being the major ranking factor, the number of inbound links will drop in value. The only links that will maintain any value will be those that actually deliver traffic. Don’t drop link building from your SEO programs yet – but it is time to look at other means of attracting traffic. At present, one of the best approaches is to develop a good social marketing campaign that will attract targeted traffic – traffic that may help to boost your search result rankings.
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