Hits, links, and content: a difficult task

As this site is new ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO) is needed, and I thought it might be best to post something about SEO, since many blogs and websites have trouble with it.

If you’re reading this I presume you have a relatively new blog (I’d say less than 4 months old,) and it has little traffic. At this point you are at the bottom of the site ladder and it is a hard ladder to climb. You see you have a problem hits, links, and content are all related in success. Take it that you have a successful site, if you keep produce good content you will always get hits and links; if you keep getting links from past visitors you will still get links; if you keep getting hits (from past SEO) you will keep on getting links. From this breakdown you might be thinking that content is king, well to some degree it is. Content does drive links and hits, but this is not the full story.

For a new site content is not king, it does not matter if you are producing the best content in the world if you have no regular visitors or aren’t picked up by the search engines because you have no links. You see beginning a new site is the hardest part of being a webmaster, especially when you have no successful sites to leach links, visitors, and page rank from.

Consider you have a new site (less than a month old,) and the following three scenarios:

1. You focus on getting links

I’d presume you would go round commenting on’ do follow’ blogs, adding the site to directories, and making forum posts with your link in the signature.You will get a few visitors and will probably get decent indexing, but you have no content. So visitors will not stay and the traffic will die. Effectively leaving the site back at square one.

2. You focus on getting hits

So an alternative would be to spam some social networking sites. Perhaps getting your site on StumbleUpon, MySpace friend spamming, even use some autosurf programs. Yes these methods will get you hits, but again with no content the hits won’t stay. Secondly, you won’t get any links made for you from these visitors as there is little for them to link to.

3. You focus on content

After a few weeks of writing long, quality posts you may have a nice site; however, with no promotion the site is not going to grow. Perhaps the search engine bots will pick up your site, but all that content is going to waste. Secondly, as content makes its way to your archives it is effectively dead, as no-one saw it and no-one linked to hit.

I hope this has demonstrated that there is no golden solution, and that there is no easy path. To build your site successfully you need to focus on all tree of these factors in the early stages, effectively building a good foundation for your site. You will need to post good content at least 2 times a week and promote your site at the same time. You should be attempting to comment on other blogs that do not use the ‘no follow’ tag, this will build both good links and some small traffic. This is especially effective if the blogs are relevant to yours, or are personal blogs by people in the same field or with similar interests to you. Finally use the social networks, StumbleUpon can drive traffic that may never think about clicking a link to your site, the RSS feeds can bring good traffic that can become regular.

I hope this post has highlighted the difficult task a new site has. If it was easy everyone would have a successful site.

I managed to post every day last month!

Real traffic with StumbleUdon and StumbleUpon

No Follow List of Lists