The Power of Link Building
If I was to pick the single most important method for promoting a newly started website, I would without any shed of a doubt pick link building. For anyone with some experience in the field of promoting websites, this won’t come as a surprise, but I thought a post emphasizing the importance of bulding incoming links would still be of some use, if not for anything else than just to act as a reminder of its importance.
Since I opened Bloggst, I have focused heavily on building incoming links, among other things through the Featured Blog Campaign. The main reason I value link bulding so highly, is because it is extremely helpful when it comes to increasing your organically referred traffic, which is traffic through search engines. That means that the most important benefit of incoming links to your website isn’t actually the traffic you get through the link itself (which is of course great too), but rather that it helps you rank better in search engines.
To use Bloggst as an example, I’ll show you some of the numbers. Yahoo currently registers a little over thousand incoming links to Bloggst. Technorati reports of around 150 incoming links from almost 60 different blogs. This might not sound all that overwhelming, but keep in mind that the site is just over three weeks old. Couple that with the fact that I’m already seeing a very decent amount of relevant visitors referred from the search engines, and that the search engine spiders are more or less continuously spidering the site, and it should highlight the value of incoming links. If this growth rate keep up, I expect that within as little as a couple of months, our traffic will increase significantly due to search engine rankings, especially once Google gives a bit more value to the site (they lag a bit compared to for instance Yahoo in this field).
Bloggst.com already has almost 300 pages indexed in Google, and close to 200 in Yahoo. This is as good as every page, and like I said, once the site gains a bit more recognition in the search engines, I firmly believe that the organic traffic will increase drastically.
What’s the lesson in all this? Work on building your inbound links! It will result in giving you more of the most valuable traffic there is, which is the organic traffic you receive through search engines. There are several ways of bulding links, but that’s a completely different topic for a different day.