My Vote Is VooDoo
Here’s the deal… SEO is the practice of increasing visibility and traffic to your website or domain. You increase traffic by creating original, high quality content and by putting a link to your website on other websites.
You put your link on other websites by creating countless profiles to said websites (blogs, forums, directories, etc.) and then being inundated by millions of emails for further promotions. Which is an annoyance. The choice is to pay someone like me to do it for you, or to spend 1-2 hours a day promoting yourself.
It’s not “brain surgery”, it’s just a commitment of time. And if you’re like me, you’re too cheap to pay someone like me to do something you can do yourself.
Domains:
My domain is flatheadenterprises.com. That string of letters is the human recognizable name of my website. Computers read that name differently. Computers read it as a url and an IP address.
The internet is like a Thomas Brothers map with over 630 million streets (as of December 2012). Your website resides on one of those streets. Your website has an address, just like your house does. It’s called a url. The url of this website is http://www.flatheadenterprises.com. Your website address also has an IP address.
IP addresses are a set of 4 numbers. IP addresses route web traffic to the server that your website resides on, and often multiple websites reside on one server and/or resolve to one IP address. The subject of IP addresses can get really boring, and I’d like to keep you interested, so to illustrate, click on this IP address:
Staying with the house analogy, your house has a parcel number just like your website has an IP address. It’s a number few can readily recite, but it exists and it’s the number that other computers use to locate your website.
That’s enough of that for now.
So how do you “proliferate” your website?
The basic premise is this; the more traffic a website gets the more important the link is. So having a link on facebook (the second most popular website in the world), is better than having a link on flatheadenterprises.com. Right?
Yeah, sort of.
There are two kinds of links; DoFollow and NoFollow.
In the world of SEO currency, DoFollow links are Benjamin Franklins, and NoFollow are scratched up pennies you find in the street.
How do you know the difference?
Some sites will tell you that any links added will not be followed, or NoFollow, but most the time you don’t know until your link is added. But let’s not worry about that just yet.
The focus here is to add your website link to as many good sites as possible. What are good sites?
Popular websites, websites that get a lot of traffic, or websites that have a lot of value. (To find out more see this)
Hopefully you’re starting to get the gist.
As a jumpstart, you want to add your link to these online directories and social media sites:
You also want a facebook fan or business page and accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn.
That’s a great starting point.
NOW WHAT?
You want to continue proliferating links to your website. Strategies abound, but here are a few:
Cheapos like me: Do It All Yourself
Hunt down every web directory you can find and add your website/company.
Find online forums and blogs and make comments. Why? because again, you set up profiles on countless websites, but in many of them you can add a signature to your profile that includes a link back to your website. You can also try to sneak adding a link to your website into the comment. Doesn’t always work, but worth a try.
Build profiles on Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Digg, etc. and interact. (pretty good list here)
BUILD A SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWING
Facebook ‘Likes’, Twitter ‘Follows’ and LinkedIn ‘Connections’. The more of those you have the better. And better still is interacting and building relationships with your likes/follows/connections. People are looking for authentic relationships, not marketing BS.
Facebook:
Build a “Welcome Page” that requires new visitors to “Like” the page before they can go to the main page. Create “Special Offers” that are only available on your fan or business page to attract new likes. For instance, “For A Chance To Win $1,000, Like Us On Facebook!!”
Search out prospective clients by aligning similar interests.
LinkedIn:
A LinkedIn profile allows you to add all kinds of information about your business and add links. Get involved with groups and build your connections by identifying prospective clients. Search through your connections “connections” and try to connect with them (really redundant right?, that’s just the LinkedIn lingo.)
Twitter:
Try to get as many “followers” as you can. Again, in your profile you can add a link to your website.
Sounds daunting right?
It can be, but there are also services that you can purchase that will automate some of this for you.
For a monthly fee Yext will add your information or profile to over a hundred directories, depending on the package you buy.
FollwerWonk is a service where you can filter your searches for Twitter followers. For instance, in the search parameters type in “Los Angeles Real Estate”. The results will be anyone in L.A. who has real estate in their profile. Then you follow any who look promising.
You can manage all your social media accounts in one place! So instead of having to login in to each and every site (facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc), you can interact with all of them in one spot.
Finally!
In Closing, the idea is to spend a little time every day playing on the internet. Seriously. I haven’t touched on Website Optimization at all because that’s not for your average Joe (no offense Joe).
The stuff above are things anyone can do, and the more you do it, the more the search engines like it. The more the search engines like it, the more traffic your website gets.
Hope this was helpful.