At Last! The Seo Magic Bullet...

Hi Yuhon,

Yeah I can appreciate what you are saying, but I don't think them having a link in their post that leads to a sales page in anyway dilutes the message.

Thanks, Peter

Hi Mike,

I think you bring up a great point.

I agree with you. They have far greater resources than what most of us do... But I also don't think most of us are trying to be the number one site in the world. And I don't think we have to have a boat load of cash to provide great value to our market.

Here is an example perhaps a little closer to home for us I.Mers.

I quite like reading the thinktraffic blog. Now I can't remember how long this blog has been going, but I think it is less than two years. His posts tend to be well thought out and thorough (No crappy 300 word articles bought from fiverr).. I.e they add real value to my life.

I just did this search in google

links:thinktraffic.net

It came back with 25,200 results.

As far as I am aware they are whitehat, just accumulating natural links from real people that see real value in the site.

Also while I am talking about thinktraffic here is a link to a thinktraffic video that is talking very much about this same topic.


How Fraser Cain Attracts 80,000 Search Visitors Per Day with Zero Link Building

Wow! it's a great video... This guy gets 80,000 visitors a day. Crazy!


Infact it's so good that I just gave it a backlink.

Hmm How about that!

Cheers, Peter.

Hi Goath, Yeah some niches are much harder than others to get this kind of thing going...

Also some of them are just a bit more boring to the end user, (so therefore less likely to get links naturally.) For example, A local plumbers site.
However this does not mean it can't be done. With a bit of clever marketing I'm sure it could.

Yes your right. This wouldn't work if your doing a lot of niche sites in which you don't have the time....

But thats kind of the point really. As the years go on and competition grows and search engines get smarter there will come a day where niche sites won't be such a quick throw up kind of job. (I'm not suggesting that they are now.. Just that they will require even more work.)

The sites that will do well and outrank the competition will be the market leaders... The sites that real people find valuable.

Thanks, Peter

Here's the SEO magic bullet...

Think like a real company...

1. Actually have something of value to offer, and have a market identified to sell to.

2. Submit a press release or 10 like any real business would do.

3. Do a little link building, blog commenting, guest posting, etc.

3. Use paid advertising (call it paid links if you want), might be a service or just buying some links.

4. I guess that's about it.

If you're offering something of real value, you'll get some natural links. But until that happens you better submit some press releases, build some links, etc.

There's no magic bullet. The game never really changes. People just have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they're trying to accomplish. If you thought of your micro niche site as a real business, and made every decision accordingly, think of how differently you'd do things.

Would you go spam a forum, or actually offer value so the people that click through the link on your signature already like you?

Would you spam blogs, or offer genuine value to the discussion and try to build real relationships with the blog owner?

Would you build 10,000 profile links or would you write 1 killer guest post for your new blogger friend?

Hi Mike,

Thanks for sharing
A very interesting read indeed.

First of all let me clarify to everyone.. I am not against link building at all. But I am against linkbuilding that doesn't add value. (and yes I agree the directory listings mentioned in your link probably don't add much value.)

I'm not against them because I think they are bad or evil or anything like that. But because I don't believe they will give you as great a return on investment in the long term.

(Obviously I can't back that up with stats as the future is not ours to see. It is just a philosophy that I hold by observing how the search engines have evolved in the last ten years and then imaging them getting smarter as the years go by.)

Building backlinks in ways that add value and that you can leverage I find are much better (and if I'm totally honest with you I simply find them more fun.)

A great example of backlinking that I am a fan of is guestblogging. Your doing it to get a backlink from a high pr site and if they have a good amount of traffic as well as your article actually being great you are quite likely to get natural backlinks to that article as well as real people who will start to follow your brand.

When we talk about "backlinking" like this it is just another word for "good marketing" really.

Sure universetoday.com would probably have less seo traffic if they didn't have those links you mentioned. But they probably would have even far less traffic if they just had crappy articles that didn't add value.

Another point worth discussing is that ultimately we as marketers are not really after backlinks, or high rankings.. We are really after traffic that in turn leads to some sort of conversion. (ie a Sale, opt-in etc.)

In this sense having valuable content will help kill two birds with one stone, as it very quickly builds the trust from your reader that is needed in order for the conversion to take place.

Going back to thinktraffic as an example and bearing in mind the concept that when we take a look at the big picture we aren't really interested in rankings or backlinks but rather traffic and conversions it is quite interesting to look at thinktraffics monthly report.

December 2011 Monthly Report – Think Traffic and Expert Enough

Now obviously in terms of conversions he doesn't share his sales figures here (for thinktraffic at least.. he does mention his other blogs sales.) But we can see new sign ups, retweets etc. And they are not bad.

Another thing that is interesting is the number of returning visitors. 40%

Why is this important to the seo statergy of "adding value" you might ask?

Well it shows that the benefit of creating valuable content is not exclusive to "getting backlinks." Your return on investment is also Trust, more "direct traffic", and more "referring traffic".

As the years go by I am sure Seo as a service will merge more with conversion rate optimisation.

And Value content will be at the heart of this.

Now for another example of getting backlinks by creating value check this out...

links:conversionxl.com

5,100 backlinks. Not Bad for a blog that is a couple of months old.

Now I haven't gone through all the links to see if there are any directory links
or anything like that. There might be. But really who cares if there are a few. The value content is much more likely to be the cause of his traffic successes.

Thanks, Peter

Hi Patrich,
Thanks for your insights,

I agree with what you have said here Patrich. Like I said in my original post "Real seo is just simply good marketing"

One thing I didn't mention however in my original post is that I am not at all against creating backlinks. (I have however now mentioned this in post #19 where I explain in more detail as to why.)

When I use the word "Marketing" I am using it in its traditional sense.

Product.
Price.
Promotion.
Distribution.

The internet is just another type of "promotion" channel as well as being just another type of "Distribution" channel.

So paying for a genuine promotion that indirectly leads to backlinks very much fits into My "real seo is just good marketing" statement.

I never said they gained popularity from publishing good content. I said they added great value to people lives. This is a different concept indeed.

And going back to the traditional sense of marketing (as mentioned above) this fits in to the "product" category. Using google and facebook as an example again. There success is not down to having good content but rather having a unique product, (some might argue against this ) that solves a problem for their market.

In this sense we can see that seo is not a stand alone branch of internet marketing and that by having a great marketing mix which adds value to your target markets life will give you a return on investment (via backlinks, build up trust, increased conversions, brand loyalty etc) which is far greater than that of doing something simply just to try and trick an algorithm to increased our serp rankings, only to find you are dumped back down again the next time there is a major algorithm update.


Thanks, Peter