increase blog traffic

Hey Blogger,

I’m going to do something bad. Something really bad to those self-claimed SEO gurus who are trying to use misleading SEO concepts to sell products to bloggers. I used to suffer from their advice and information. I am a stand for every blogger to succeed in their blog and I’m going to reveal these misleading concepts. Of course, this won’t hurt SEO gurus who taught real stuff. They are the one I respect and learn from.

1. More Links = More Traffic

The fact is more links might get your blog penalized faster if you build the wrong way. So called SEO gurus who bring up this statement are mostly trying to sell you some link building software of services. There’re some problems with this claim:

Problem #1: Most of the search engine traffic comes from the keywords you are aiming. If there are hundreds of people searching for that keyword on Google and your blog is at #1 of the search result, you might get hundreds of visitors per day. But if you are not aiming for any keywords and merely building links to your blog, you’ll get traffic too. But it will be very little.

The power of SEO doesn’t come solely come from your ability to build links. It comes from your ability to choose high traffic keywords which have low competition.

Problem #2: Sometimes more links will get your blog penalized faster. If your blog is less than 1 year old, you’ll get penalized easily. Recently, I just did an experiment and realized that my new blog got penalized with less than 10 backlinks per day. These services or software will probably build lots of backlinks to your blog at a short time. This will get Google to suspect your backlinks and penalize it for 5-6 months.

One of the reasons that cause this to happen is that Google doesn’t trust new domain name. Many internet marketers use new domain name to manipulate search results by aiming for certain keywords. Another reason will be new sites usually won’t get lots of backlinks at the beginning because it takes time for lots of people to get to know its existence.

2. Auto Link Exchanger

All you need to do is just sign up a membership (free or paid ones) and install a script on your blog. The website will automatically exchange links with other members. This is a smart but bad idea. There are 3 reasons:

Reason #1: 2 way links or link exchanging is no longer as powerful as before. If linking to others is similar to voting for others, 2 way linking is similar to “I vote for you and you vote for me”. Google is able to detect these links right now and give your blog lower ranking.

Reason #2: The ways these links are built are simply too fast. It will get your blog penalized within days. I tried that before and I never receive any traffic from Google for months. Some software or script maybe able to control the speed but there’s a similar pattern on each of those scripts. These patterns will be easily identified by Google when more people are using it.

3. Article Auto Submission

Article auto submission software and services are very popular nowadays. I still remember what an Internet Marketer said to me (and other audiences) “If you get 100 people to read your articles when you submit to one article directory, how many people will read your articles if submit to all 600 article directories? Can you imagine how much traffic you’ll get?”

If this happen, I’ve quit Blog SEO long time ago and focus on writing articles everyday. This claim is not very true because Google don’t index webpages with duplicated contents.

I used to submit my articles to 6000 sites with a submission service. What I got is just 30-50 backlinks to my blog. This happens because Google don’t want to annoy their users by showing lots of similar content when they do a search on the search engine (Imagine you type “free traffic tips” and first 10 webpages are exactly the same). Second reason is to discourage spammers from using same content to manipulate results.

4. Social Bookmarking

Using social bookmarking to get high quality backlinks to your blog?

This used to be a very powerful technique to get both traffic and backlinks. However, more people are using it to manipulate search results so both the search engines and social bookmarking sites have taken some action. If most of the pages you bookmarked is from the same domain name, the suspect you are using the service for your own. They will either send you a warning letter or stop linking and send traffic to that site.

5. Article Spinning

Heard of article spinning?

Article spinning is basically a software that allows you to turn one articles into many (probably hundreds) similar but different articles, so you can submit them to article directories. This looks like a smart way to avoid duplicated content issue. 1 article turned into 100 articles. And you can submit it to article directories to get both traffic and backlinks.

This service can only change very few words unless you are willing to spend hours to create that original article. If 30%-50% of the 100 articles are the same, they are still considered as duplicated content. It is hard for the software to create articles with such requirements.As a conclusion, change most of the words in your article if you want to use this service.

6. Long Tail Keywords

“Popular Keywords are too competitive, go for the long tail and you’ll get to rank easily.”

This statement is not very true. Firstly, long tail keywords that are shown in the keyword tools are just estimates and not guaranteed searches every month. Will there be a situation where 1000 people searching for a keyword this month and no one searching for it next month? Sure. You need to grab those keywords that have more than 100 searches per day and not all the long tail keywords which used to be hot searches. I used to rank for a keyword which has 20 searches per day but end up with no traffic for a year.

Secondly, there are some keywords that are almost at the end of the tail which doesn’t give you any traffic. Lastly, long tail could be competitive as well. There’re some keywords which have low searches but highly profitable such as keywords that related to real estate, insurance or credit car. Without doing a competition analysis and assuming “long tail = low competition” is suicidal.

7. Web 2.0

Some ‘SEO gurus’ might recommend you to use Squidoo, Hubpages, free webpages, free blogs, article directories or other web 2.0 tools to build massive backlinks to your blog. Besides article directories, most of them are free to register. So, some people might use those services to create free webpages which contain links to their blog.

If you are building 10 links from each of them, that’ll be fine. You might just used up a bit of your time. But if you build hundreds of links from each of those sites, that’s already considered as Black Hat Technique. These will hurt your ranking and blog too. Many internet marketers didn’t warn us about not to overuse it.

Be careful with services which help you to build links with web directories too. Some of them built too fast and get your blog penalized too. I don’t use these services. These days, I get my staff to submit my blog to web directories. And ignore those advice about grabbing free contents from other websites because duplicated content issue is a problem.

That’s the lies about SEO. Don’t get caught by these wonderful lies and waste your money on them.



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