Build Links, Build Authority, Build Traffic

Long before I even knew what internet marketing was, I was playing around with websites. I built hobby websites, and built websites for friends. When I was building these websites, frames were still considered “cool” and animated .gifs were “the bomb.”  The web was still young, and while I didn’t know what internet marketing was, I knew the importance of getting traffic to my sites (even if I was using on-page counters to track that traffic).

So, what is a kid playing around with websites to do?  It’s not like I had a marketing budget.  So, I did the logical thing: I found other websites that catered to similar audiences, and I e-mailed them and asked them for links.  Then, I found directories that catered to my audience, and submitted my sites to these directories.  Fast forward quite a few years, and after an aborted legal career, I found myself learning about and working in internet marketing.  Imagine my surprise when I found out that the exact things that I had been doing 10+ years ago, simply because they were the only way I knew how to get traffic, were now called SEO, and firms were charging lots of money for those services.

When I was link building, it wasn’t for the purposes of optimizing for search engines.  Hell, Google didn’t even exist at the time, and Yahoo was more of a directory than a search engine.  I was just building links to get the value that was intrinsic to those links.

I think that’s the reason why I’ve always had such a hard time wrapping my head around the SEO industry. On the one hand, it’s all common sense. On the other hand, the way firms go about doing SEO and link-building makes no sense.

The goal behind link-building in SEO is primarily, and in some cases exclusively, to increase search engine ranking.  What happened to the days when I got those links for my websites, and all I was looking for was the traffic that those links provided. Here’s the thing that seems to get lost in a lot of the SEO shuffle: link building has value in and of itself.

As an example, Leo Babauta, author of the Zen Habits blog, one of the most popular blogs in the world, and one that has turned Leo into a published author has publicly said on numerous occasions that he doesn’t believe in SEO.  He had his site built with proper architecture, but beyond that, he never did any SEO on Zen Habits.  So, how is it that one of the most popular blogs in the world didn’t do any SEO?  Well, here’s the thing, it did – just not for the sake of doing SEO.

Leo, did plenty of link building, but he never called it link building. He went into the blogosphere and commented on hundreds (thousands?) of blogs.  He wrote one guest post a week for a while.  He wrote article after article after article, and got them published on other websites, and all had a link back to his own site.  He also published tons of really great content on his own site, which encouraged others to link to it on their own.

Is any of this sounding familiar?  That’s right, it’s SEO.  Except it’s not.  Leo didn’t go out with the intent to do SEO. He went out with the intent to spread the world about his blog, to make connections and to build authority.  He got tons of traffic from this process that did not come from Google.  It came from other sites.  It just so happened, that this process of building connections and authority is exactly what search engines like Google are looking for in their rankings, and as such, Zen Habits got a lot of SEO juice out of the practice.

What Leo did was not rocket science, in fact, it’s the same thing that I did over a decade ago as a kid just discovering the web (only on a bigger scale with better content).

Your website can benefit from this same link building and inadvertent SEO practice.  All you have to do is follow a relatively simple recipe.

1. Create content that other people will want to link to
2. Create content on other sites that links to your site, such as guest blog posts, ezine article submissions and social media stations
3. Connect with the connectors and the mavens in your industry, and get them to spread the word about your site
4. Get featured in a mainstream publication if you can
5. Feature others on your site – they will at the very least mention the fact that they appeared on your site to their audiences

All of these steps will produce traffic in and of themselves, with the added benefit of also improving your search engine rankings.  What not to do is what a lot of SEO firms have been doing:

1. Submit links to a directory no one actually visits
2. Write articles and submit them to sites no one actually reads

Link-building purely for the sake of SEO is like using twenty dollar bills to insulate your walls.  You may end up achieving your goal, but there are more efficient ways to go about it.