SEO: Quality Over Quantity 

I have fallen for SEO lies told by unscrupulous marketers before and I have paid the price for it in terms of my time and money. I am sticking to the basics and I plan to keep doing what most people can’t be bothered to do. I won’t buy into crappy automation software and black hat techniques ever again.

The big lessons I learnt about SEO are:

1. Quality over quantity when it comes to incoming links to your web site.
2. Be willing to do the hard work that most people are unwilling to do on a consistent basis.

Quality Over Quantity

Have you ever bought into the hype of a particular software that promised to blast your site to hundreds of directories to get hundreds of incoming links, increase your search engine rankings, get more traffic so that you will get more money? I have! What a waste of my time and money.

I bought into software that submits my web sites into free article directories and software that submits my articles to hundreds of article directories. I falsely believed that even though most of these directories were crap, I would at least get an almighty back link to my web site and that would be worth it. My belief back then was “a back link is better than no back link“. That was just stupid and ignorant of me!

What I discovered was Google was way smarter than all these software programmers that created these submitters. If you think you can beat Google, think again… They created their search engine and crap like this just won’t last. You can’t build a real business around a temporary loophole in their search engine algorithm.

Technically, you should have 800 plus links back to your web site if you submit to the article directories and web directories in those submitters. What they don’t tell you is Google literally ignores these links. Just do a back link check in the Google by entering “link:YOURDOMAIN.com” and you will get what I mean. Why don’t you have 800 plus incoming links listed in Google? Obviously, Google doesn’t care about 100% of these 800 plus links. Yahoo and MSN tends to detect more incoming links but the traffic they send you is very little compared to Google.

I have tested paid directory links on 4 of my content sites and left 6 other content sites without paid directory links. All 10 sites have free directory links from the list of free directories in SubmitEaze. The maximum Google PR I got for the 6 sites without paid directory links was 1 while all the 4 sites with paid directory links had PR 3-4. I paid about $100 for 2 links to each of the 4 web sites and the traffic they generate beats the pants out of the ones without them.

Therefore I came to the conclusion that paying for a submission into a high Google PR and high Alexa ranking directory is way better than submitting my web site into a few hundred free directories. The time it takes to submit to a few hundred free directories is a waste of money because I could have used that time for more productive activities.

Be Willing To Do the Hard Work

• Most people are too lazy to do the necessary grunt work to get lots of traffic to their web sites.
• Most people are too stingy to pay $50 or more to get their web sites reviewed and listed on legitimate and high quality directories.
• Most people are too lazy to create high quality content for their web sites and syndicate high quality articles to promote their web sites.
• Most people want something for nothing and will not take as much action as they should to get the results they desire.

You don’t have to worry too much about your competition as much as you have to worry about your own levels of self-discipline, commitment and consistency. Hard work needs to be synonymous with productive activities that produce the results you want.

We all want more traffic to our web sites and we all know we need more incoming links. If we purely focus on getting more incoming links, we might lose our main focus of getting traffic. It was not until I asked myself “Which link back to my web site would result in more traffic?” that I began to prioritize my activities on the effective links and cut out the ineffective ones instead of blindly blasting to directories.

I used to look at a web site’s Google PR and assumed that it would be beneficial for my web site if I had a link back from a high Google PR site. What I failed to see was would that link from that high Google PR site bring me a lot of traffic? Ultimately, I want more traffic to my web site so why should I care about the Google PR when it does not indicate the traffic levels of a web site? Instead, I began to look at the Alexa rankings of a web site to determine if the link from a particular web site would be beneficial for me in terms of traffic.

It is possible to get a link to your web site from a high Google PR and high Alexa ranking site. Incoming links, search engine rankings, Google PR and everything else ultimately leads to the main goal of getting TRAFFIC. Forget that and you’ll be like me in the past - doing a lot of unproductive hard work that led to little or no productive traffic.

Tagged As: backlinks, incoming+links, search+engine+optimization, seo, traffic

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | 11 Comments »