Traffic From Links
This is an often-neglected source of getting traffic. Links to your site, apart from boosting your search engine ranking also brings traffic to your site, depending of the volume of traffic the referring site receives, and the location of your link in the referring site.
If your link is hidden in an obscure page, or thrown into a page with hundreds of link, you will hardly get any traffic.
Link building is a long-term process. You can’t always force the pace as genuine and enduring links are built by contacting the webmasters of the sites you are interested in.
The most valuable links are from directories (especially human edited directories) and are ranked highly by search engines for many reasons. Directories display links by categories, hence are a valuable resource for people looking for information. Human edited directories have high quality listings and attract high quality traffic, which is critical for your business online. Secondly, search engines regards a link from one site to another as a vote or recommendation, hence the more links to a site, the higher it ranks in search engine results, resulting in higher traffic. Search engines give a higher weight from human edited directories than other sites; hence you end up with more traffic from directories, and even more traffic from the search engines.
There are three ways you can get links:
The DIY Approach
This is the most time-consuming approach, but when you’re starting out and you don’t have money to outsource (besides very few companies do SEO in the real sense of the word for you in Nigeria) or buy links, this is the way to go. You’ll start out with getting links from the major directories and then start contacting other high-ranking websites (for your keywords), asking them for links (or link exchanges).
Outsourcing
Some companies and web designers claim they will do search engine optimization for you, but few really know what the term means. As a standard practice, SEO companies maintain a directory as a means of kick starting a campaign, and also using it in exchanging links with other sites on behalf of their clients. The reality is, if they know what SEO really means, they would have done it on their own sites to rank high in Google etc. You cannot give what you do not have. Some claim they will get you in Google index and hundreds of directories. Directories that accept automated submissions are spam directories. They charge fantastic sums, but the reality is that submission to Google, most search engines and directories is FREE. The fastest way to get into Google's index is to be linked to from as site that is already in the Google index. Then when Googlebot (Google's crawler) crawls that site, it will find your link, and follow it to arrive at your site, and you are in business. You get to show up in Google in a week, as against submitting direct, which takes at least six weeks.
If you want to outsource your link building, make sure that you do a background check on whoever you contract because you don’t want to be stuck with links from a bad neighborhood (spam sites/directories which are frowned upon by Google et al), and also check out their ranking in Google for their keywords. If they cannot help themselves, chances are they cannot help you.
Buying links
Buying a link entails paying another site to place a link to your site from their home page etc. It also works out as advertising. People see the description of your site, and click on your link to arrive at your site. It can be expensive, but often worth the investment especially if you are buying links for traffic as well as search engine rankings. A good place to start, apart from directories are high traffic sites like Guardian, Sun, Punch, Vanguard etc websites. Some of them get up to 60,000 visits a day, and quite a tidy number will be sent your way on a daily basis, if they place your link at a strategic position. It can either be a text link or banner.
Return to Guide to Starting Your Home Based Internet Business Index
