Driving Traffic To Your Site and other frustrated mutterings

First let me just say, that according to Webster.com Titillate means "to excite"... so I would appreciate it if you would stop being shocked by my creative alliteration in the capsule subtitle! :0)

Today my children are with their father. While most mom's would take this opportunity to clean the house and enjoy it's unblemished status of cleanliness... not me, I'm not like most Mom's... I'm a geek. Yes, yes I am. I'm the friend that would really appreciate the "bar code" t-shirt that they have to use their android barcode scanner app to read. (I know, sounds cool right?)

Anyway, today I planned on spending my quiet hours increasing traffic to my websites. (It's a sickness) I got up at 4:00 am (after falling asleep on the couch at 8:00pm) I'm on my second pot of coffee... and it's OMG it's already 2:13pm... the kids are coming home in ... ummm... 4 hours... I'm almost out of time! (right? totally a sickness) In my defense I did pop out to get my hair cut... spent a luxurious hour and a half in the salon talking to Laurie my stylist... but that's not why I'm writing this hub.

I'm writing this hub to tell you what I learned (and to record it somewhere so that I can refer back to it).

Links... good and bad.

Blog Farms ... a no no

Content is still King.

So, let's go over Links first.

I have struggled with the whole concept of LINKS since I started building websites. I mean... We use hyperlinks all the time right? Is that what Google wants? Turns out, not necessarily. Google wants you to use the link within your content in a manner that makes sense and is useful. So, if I write a book review and I link to the author's website... that's a good link... for the author. So, following that theory... when I link to coupons on my coupon website, that's a good link for the actual coupon provider... see where I'm going with this.

To get a good link, you need someone to write about you.

You need someone to say, "Hey take a look at what this person is doing here...."

AND... it would be even better if you could get someone that is very reputable to write about you, someone that is very reputable to write about you and include a link.

This is where I focused this morning and read about Blog Farms. Which initially sounded like a great idea... Blog Farms are essentially a place where you can register your blog and you agree to read and comment about other blogs just as other people agree to read and comment on yours. Thus building links back and forth. Turns out Google doesn't like Blog Farms because it's cheating and several articles went as far as to map out how to hide the face that you either created or participated in a blog farm.

Honestly, there is no grey area. If you get caught, you get removed from the google index and that will spell disaster for you ever getting found.

Then I looked into Forums.

Now, I'm a pretty smart person, but for the life of me... I have ABSOLUTELY NO PATIENCE FOR FORUMS. Never have, never will. I'm not sure why... half the time I can't follow the darn things and then I get all the way to the end just to find out that no one has an answer to the original question... However, supposedly forums are very good for generating "link juice" (like that?... I picked up that swinging lingo in my research) AH HAH! I bet that's why I can never follow the silly things... everyone's just using them to link back to their own site! :0)

BAD LINKS. Bad links are links that the search engines don't like. AND, I read a very humorous article called Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound LInks Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth (written by Jason Lancaster. Here is an excerpt that is the crux of the argument:

The key word here is exchange. If evil doers link to your site, that’s one thing. But if you link back? Your odds of being penalized are much, much higher. Links are votes, so be careful who you link to. If you can’t vouch for the quality of a specific link (say a link provided in a comment signature), then use the rel=nofollow attribute.

10 bucks says, Jason doesn't link to me! :0) Just kidding... My point is... there is a lot of information about bad links... and it seems to me that 90% of the articles I read were trying to sell me something that would increase my links..

While I write this, I am using my 7 day free trial of LinkBuilder whose short story is they will provide me with contact information so I can email someone asking them if they want to exchange links. Now that I'm writing this... I can't imagine why anyone with a Page Rank on Good would even want to link to my little site... but it's a free trial. right? I'll keep you posted. It's been looking for content info since I started writing.

In my mind I guess I imagined a Blog Farm... as a vast directory of Blogs. Sort of like when you go to blogger.com and just search through their database... but from what I've read a Blog Farm is actually something very sinister.

It's a portal into the dark world of Link Cheats. (can you tell I'm getting tired?)

Another intriguing term I heard today is Black Hat SEO... I'm not sure if it's supposed to conjure up an image of a man with a black bowler hat, tuxedo and pencil thin mustache tying a damsel to the railroad tracks ... or not but apparently BLACK HAT seo is a no no.

According to one source, “Blog Farming is the process of creating Blogs which are intended for a purpose other than adding value for its readers. Most of the blogs created contain duplicate content or content which do not add any value"

Hmmmm, then I wonder what Google thinks about THE BLOG FARM... which bills it's self as a blog directory. Honestly, I'm still a little confused about that the difference is between a blog farm and a blog directory.. who decides if the person is just giving bloggers a place to list their work... and a chance to read other bloggers work?

I guess all we can do is continue to write original content and hope that the All Mighty Google shines it's indexing light down on us!

AMERICAN FAMILY SWEEPSTAKES | BIGGEST LOSER COACH NETWORK

No one disputes that content is king. Not a single article I read has a single solitary negative thing to say about truly original content... and alot of it!

Here is my experience. I write a Gluten Free Blog. It's called http://2beglutenfree.com . It all started when my daughter was having health issues. So, I started a blog because that's what I do (you should read the blog I wrote while I was going through my divorce 6 years ago... it was Gooooooooooood)

Anyway, even though my daughters health issues have subsided, because I updated that blog every day and it is a popular topic (gluten-free is the new fad) I am still getting hits even though I haven't updated it in over 3 months.

That means I'm still getting hits on the adword links... (rock on!) And even though I think 100 visitors a day is fantastic for my little blog, if I want to make money... it will need like 1000 a day or more.

So, this website which I labored over for a year is getting the same number of hits that a Book Review website I write is getting... and about half the time.

Why? I can only guess that my book review website is
A) also a popular niche
B) each post lists a specific book and author

In retrospect it's clear that the posts with the most hits and comments are my reviews of books that appear on the "TOP 100 BEST BOOKS OF...." list.

Do you see where I'm going... content. CONTENT. For years I wrote about things that interested me... only to realize that I'm not like most people. Not everyone has a craft room, not everyone loves teach people how to use software applications, not everyone likes to design websites and .... sigh.... almost no one wants to visit my websites about those topics... BUT... I learned this year that PEOPLE LOVE to read and will sometimes look for book reviews before making their purchase... AND... I found out that people LOVE COUPONS. too!

Not long ago I read an article about "Critical Mass of Content" which I believe is defined by enough content to continue to drive traffic to your site so that you don't have to spend hours writing every day.

I can't imagine what that mass is. Because I don't think any of my websites have even seen more then a 100 clicks in a single day.... but I will say. Content is time consuming.

There aren't really any shortcuts for original content.

SMASHREADER | SMASHINGCOUPONS | 2BEGLUTENFREE

All that blabbering and you probably already know or atleast suspect what I'm going to tell you... there are no easy money. The only people getting rich on the internet are
#1) People who have a physical product that other people want...
#2) People who are trying to convince me that by spending $47.00 they will unlock the mysteries of the internet and all of it's riches will flow to my paypal account. :0)

(speaking of which... remember link builder, well it was building and building and building so I told it to stop and gimme what it found. Now... this application is meant to locate the links that are currently linking to my competition and then search those sites for contact information so I... I don't know, I guess so I can write them an email and ask them to... I don't know, link to me? ... but funny thing, the first 50 websites didn't have contact information.. just twitter and facebook feeds... I suppose there is some insight we can glean from that... )

OK back to the topic at hand.

If you are like me... (by me, I don't mean aging and slightly overweight.... but rather, that I'm not made of money) then like me you will continue to add to your critical mass of original content... and use free tools found on sites like AND... OH I forgot...

Don't forget to also write articles that get syndicated, check this out, I published an article on GoArticles today and already found it on Bing. I'll keep you posted to see that helps! But I use the Free Tools on SubmitExpress (just make sure you set up a separate free email account because using that site ALWAYS fills the inbox with solicitations)

Enjoy Your Day