All I have to do is just start a website and “Viola” – the traffic will just appear.
I’ve heard, if I get lots of traffic, Google will take note of that and move me up the charts.
I’m thinking about buying a list so I can get the big traffic and be ranked high in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, can be a big myth to many people, especially those that believe some of these statements above.
What is the right answer then?
And how do you find the truth?
First recommendation would be to hire a Utah SEO consultant 🙂
If you’re not ready for that yet, try it out on your own for a while, and then hire an SEO consultant to fix what you may have messed up.
Before you mess it up too bad though, there are a lot of great people out there willing to share tips and tricks.
Thanks to Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz for the clarification on traffic in correlation to search engine rankings in his Whiteboard Friday tip.
Does Traffic Equal High SEO Results?
Summary
Talking about user and usage data and why they don’t influence search results very much.
“Maybe if I get lots of users to go to Google, search for my brand name, click my listing, and then check out my site, Google will give me higher rankings…”
The answer is, “No, not really!”
This strategy is pretty “gameable”. It doesn’t follow the SEO model of link popularity, inbound link quality scores, etc.
On their own, user data will not improve SEO rankings.
The big reason why it won’t work is manipulation.
Mechanical Turk: people who will do small tasks on the web for small amounts of money. Millions of people participate in mechanical turk. However, it’s not going to work for SEO – you can’t hire “turkers” to go visit your site and certain times of day and manipulate search engine results. It’s too easy to manipulate.
Bot Net: zombie computers that create manipulative activity to trick the search engines. Welcome to the world of Black Hat SEO.
The SEO Techniques that Really Matter
- Accessibility
- Internal Link Structure
- Site Architecture
- Keyword Research & Targeting
- Link Building
- Social Networking Aspects
Clicking on your search engine listing isn’t going to help you magically appear at the number one spot.
How did this help clarify your SEO strategy?
Thanks to my SEO friend, Dan Patterson, for sharing this video clip with me.
Hi Nate
It’s a really nice post with perfectly matching video. I know that just clicking on my site’s link won’t do much. Since I’m still struggling a bit I decided to go back and really review my keywords once again. Eventhough there are few people around me who think my online business will not work, I ‘m not ready to give up 🙂
Really nice post
Zaneta,
It’s hard when people around you don’t believe that you can succeed, sometimes it’s almost like they don’t WANT you to.
Let that be a motivation for you to SHOW THEM.
When I built my first online business, I had a lot of nay-sayers too. It was great motivation to show all of them what I COULD DO.
Keep me posted on your progress.
Talk soon!
Nate Moller
MollerMarketing.com
I don’t buy this completely. I’ll tell you what swayed me:
I had a site about a year ago that was so new it wasn’t showing up in Google for its own name. In fact, it was barely indexed at all.
I was trying to get some exposure at this time, so I shot out a few emails to some journalists I thought might be interested. Sure enough, a guy at the Boston Herald picked it up and ran a feature both in the paper and online.
Well, you can’t drop a link in the newspaper, so the result was thousands of people Googling my site’s name in a 24 hour period. Within two days, I was ranking incredibly well for a new site, and it all started with this.
Coincidence? Possibly so. But it was enough to keep me from automatically discounting the value of brand searching.
Great information thanks for posting and attaching the video.
Nate great site, knowledge…I’m doing online almost everything ebay, blogging, generate pages, amazon…blah blah…5 years doing it. Well I’m still so and so income but still I just do it hoping maybe one day luck on my site and I see easily matrix on the web 🙂
I hope that what Kevin posted is right….that increased web traffic can help improve search results. We have been working hard to increase traffic through connecting with bloggers as a result our traffic has increased 10 fold in the last week. We are thrilled with that and hope Google search results will improve!
We are a bunch of volunteers and opening a brand new scheme in our
community. Your web site provided us with valuable information to work on.
You have done an impressive job and our whole group
might be thankful to you.