Building Site Traffic That Matters

A customer using the Heatherstone Foundation website had a question about driving traffic to their site by purchasing an “advanced membership” from a company that aggregates website links en masse.

To answer his question, we created a thumbnail write-up of how SEO, or search engine optimization, works. I’ve removed the names of the parties involved, but otherwise, here’s the advice I gave our client:

{“Advanced Membership”} is something I would recommend staying away from. Early SEO efforts revealed that lots of links could improve search engine page rankings. This led to the creation of “link farms,” or sites that had no content other than line after line of links.  You could pay to include your site, thus driving up your relevancy calculation.

Of course, the search engine algorithms change over time. The development teams at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like realized that people were using link farms to skew relevancy, so they accounted for it. Link farms became at best useless and at worst a way to get your site black-listed or devalued.  This kind of gaming the system is called “black hat” SEO because it tries to find gimmicks to increase search engine placement. The search engine companies frown on such things and do their best to block each new gimmick.

The best kind of SEO is to use “white hat” techniques. Relevant articles are the best of these, although that means investing time and effort. Quality content added frequently leads to quality visitors and enhanced reputation for your site and your business.

When thinking about SEO, the golden rule is that search engines attempt to model as closely as possible what the person using the search engine will actually want to see. Figure out what your visitors want to see, what will get them to pick up the phone and call (or whatever your goal might be), and that’s what should be on your site.

Will random visitors be drawn to become customers of yours because of a page filled with automatically generated links to pages you’ve never looked at? It seems highly unlikely. I would save my time and money for more worthwhile alternatives. It’s important to remember that your website has a goal beyond attracting visitors, namely visitor conversion.