The SEO Blog - Traffic Generation Techniques

Okay, so nobody ever said I was good about putting up blog posts on a regular basis, but this is ridiculous. I haven’t posted anything here since February. Sorry ’bout that.

Anyway,

I’ve had a few people email me and how Linksvana is working for me? I have a solid six months worth of data I can share with you about how its worked for me, so I figured I’d share the results with you and let you make up your own mind if its worth it.

You can read my old post about it if you need to catch up about what the heck Linksvana does, but if you don’t know anything about it, it’s a one way link building system.

Now a tool is only useful if you use it. So I’m only posting the traffic data for sites that I added 50 or more links to their network. For the most part we kept doing what we were doing on each site, but this wasn’t a perfect scientific study.

I found that if I only added a few links to a site, then there was no appreciable increase in traffic.

My Results:
Site 1 – 256 links added
January – 2133 visitors
July – 7319 visitors

Site 2 – 113 links added
January – 1502 visitors
July – 1602 visitors
(never saw much of a jump in traffic, but revenue is up about $120/month so I’ll take it)

Site 3 – 68 links added
January – 2063 visitors
July – 3067 visitors

Site 4 – 74 links added
January – 579 visitors
July – 999 visitors

Site 5 – 171 links added
January – 27597 visitors
July – 73947 visitors

Site 6 – 59 links added
January - 0 visitors (launched in May)
July – 445 visitors
With this site, I only used the Linksvana system to get links, nothing else. I did manage to get some top ten rankings in google despite the on page SEO sucking for this site, so as best I can tell, Google is definitely giving some weight to the links from their system.

One last thing I’ll add here is that while you can’t tell from the data, I got much better results from sites where I added links consistently over time instead of just doing one link building push. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing me say that you need to build links over time, so I’ll hop off my soapbox now.

If you want to check it out, it’s Linksvana.com – I’ve found it to be a worthwhile investment for me although it does take some time to actually use it (although it can all be outsourced pretty easily).

If you have any questions or would like to share your own results, post them in the comments below - I’d be interested to hear from you.

I see posts in forums just about everyday from somebody new wondering how they can get free traffic to their website or how they can get high search engine rankings.

They want to know all the magical little “secrets” to getting tons of traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

I used to reply to all of these forums posts with my answer, but it always seemed that someone would pop up the very next day asking the same question, so I’m going to cover some very simple things you can do to get traffic to your website right here in my blog instead.

But here’s the key…

You ready?

You sure? You might not want to hear this.

Okay, if you’re really sure…

The key to building up massive amounts of free search engine traffic is to take ACTION.

It’s not some silly little automated system that just sucks up your money, or the latest search engine “loophole” for you to exploit that will actually accomplish the opposite of what you want.

The key is to take action so if you’re expecting to sit on your butt and traffic will magically appear, then free search engine traffic isn’t for you. It’s great traffic to get, but it takes a little bit of work to get it.

Okay, if I’ve got you convinced that taking action is what it’s going to take to get a lot of free search engine traffic, let me give you some simple actions you can take.

Daily Actions

Here are some actions you can take on a daily basis, and once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to do this all within 15 minutes. Some things you could do: make a post everyday in a niche related to your website with a simple link in your signature linking back to your website; make a post on your website’s blog; you could also comment on other people’s blogs leaving helpful feedback or commentary and also including a link back to your site.

Obviously, that’s not an all inclusive list of things you can do to build traffic on a daily basis, but it should help you get the wheels turning in your head to come up with even more ways.

Weekly Actions

For your weekly actions, you could take an hour or two out of one day and get these done. You could write an article or two on a topic related to your website, and submit it to popular article directories like EzineArticles. You could also submit your website to 5-10 directories. There are literally thousands of directories out there. You could even record a video and put it up on Youtube and other video sharing sites, and drive traffic to your site with video.

Monthly Actions

Every month you could take an hour or two to write and distribute a press release. Press releases are actually easy to write, and a good press release can drive a ton of traffic to your website in addition to getting you a lot of high quality links.

So there you have it, some simple actions you can take on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Just make sure you pick something you can do on a consistent basis and watch your website traffic keep on going up right along with it.

Want more strategies like this to get more traffic to your website? Then be sure to sign up for my printed monthly newsletter about traffic generation - Traffic Transformation Monthly. Every month I’ll send you some of my best strategies for getting more visitors and on how to convert those visitors into buyers.

If you’re wondering if the Linkvana one way link building system is a worthwhile investment, then this review if for you.

When it comes to link building systems, I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of junk out there. And when it comes to link building a lot of people take the attitude of, “couldn’t hurt.”

In the world of link building, that’s not true at all. If you get links from “bad neighborhoods” or if you get too many at once or if they all use the same anchor text, these links that you thought were going to help you will actually hurt your search engine rankings and could even lead to the eventual banning of your domain name.

I know because I’ve used many of them in the past in an attempt to more easily improve my position in the search engines.

So it’s only natural I guess that I would be skeptical of a one way link building system that allows you to build unlimited links to unlimited domains. My first thought was, “here we go again.”

However, after reading the salesletter at www.linksvana.com (which was surpringly low key and hype free) I started to think that maybe, just maybe this one was different.

It sounded like it had been designed to not only be easy to use, but also to build links the correct way. And by correct I’m saying that you can vary up the anchor text pointing to your site, build links slowly over time instead of all at once, and get links from quality sites that all have Pagerank and a quality backlink structure of their own.

After debating it for about a week, I finally did decide to just bit the bullet and give it a try.

And once I got the hang of the system I found that it was extremely effective in increasing the rankings, and consequently traffic of several of my test sites. In just two weeks, I saw the traffic on two of my test sites double, and now I have to admit that I’m hooked.

What I’ve done is identified the 8 main advantages this system has over many of the others that you’ll see floating around out there promising to help you build one way links to your website.

1) Links are built over time.

The main problem that most link building systems have is that they build too many links too quickly. Linksvana has solved that that problem by throttling how many links it will send to one “project” at a time. I believe the limit is set to 8 links per day, which is about right.

However, through the magic of their queue system you can build several hundred links in a month, and their system will automatically spread them up over the course of the entire month instead of sending them all to your website at once.

If you’ve ever used a system like PayPerPost.com you know just how fast you can typically get links when your campaign is approved – typically it’s too fast.

2) Blogs in the network are all unique content

Unique content is king. However, the content also needs to make sense. Linksvana only accepts unique content in their system (and not junk “spun” content either). That means that their blogs look just like any other blog on the Internet – unique. This feature prevents any potential footprints and keeps the links you get from this system of high value.

That means it’s a little bit more work initially, but the long term benefits of a unique content system completely trump the little bit more effort you need to put in.

3) Blogs all have age and Pagerank

Of course, if all the blogs were brand new and not indexed in Google, they really wouldn’t do much good in helping your search engine rankings.

While I do have some theories as to how this system was put together, I’m still rather amazed that they have so many different blogs that are all at least Pagerank 2 (many are higher) and that they’re all at least a year old with some being up to six years old. The fact that these blogs are in good standing in Google is critical to making it work.

4) Easiest system I’ve ever used to build deep links to a website

Have you read my blog post on deep links? If not, then suffice it to say, deep links are extremely important to helping your website rank well in the search engines, especially for highly competitive terms.

The only problem is that a lot of other link building techniques only help you build links to the home page of your website. The other easy way to do this is through article marketing, but since article marketing just isn’t as effective as it used to be, this system make a great replacement to using articles to build deep links.

5) Centralized Interface

One of the things I’ve really come to appreciate about this system is the centralized user interface. You can manage all of your projects from one control panel, and using the system is actually quite intuitive. And I have nothing against 3waylinks.net (which I also recommend), but this system is so much easier to use.

6) Unlimited Links and Domains

While every system has practical limits somewhere, you’re not limited in the number of links you can build to one website and you’re not limited to the number of domains you can add.

While you can only build 240 links per month to one domain, you could do that every month, and you could do that on 50 domains if you liked every month. That’s 12,000 links per month!

7) Easy to do yourself or cheap to outsource

Part of the reason that they allow you to have unlimited numbers of links and domains is that a little bit of work has to go into creating each link. You don’t just login and automatically queue up 2880 links and forget about building links for the rest of the year.

Instead, you write short little blogs posts (each must be unique, not PLR, copied, or spun content) and then you queue up the post in the system. A couple days later you’ve got a link.

While these posts are easy to write and only take about 3 minutes to do apiece, there is still a time commitment involved.

If you just don’t have that kind of time, then they have a ridiculously cheap outsourcing option where you can have them create the unique blog posts for you for just $2/post. So even if you don’t have time, you can use this system to build a heck of a lot of quality links.

8 - Limited number of members allowed

To protect the integrity of the network and to allow everyone to get the most benefit out of a system like this, it makes sense that this type of network has to be limited in the number of people who can join.

That’s why I’m writing this review right now. Normally, I’d spend several more months testing this system like I did with 3waylinks.net to be absolutely certain it works before I recommended it to you. However, I’m fairly certain it will be full by then, and I don’t want you to miss out.

My initial testing has found that it can very quickly and very effectively boost your rankings, especially for terms of low and medium competition (I haven’t tested high competition keywords yet as it has been less than a month since I started using this system). And keep in mind that if you have a bunch of low traffic keywords that you rank well for that even though each page doesn’t bring in substantial traffic that together they will bring in a ton of traffic.

So what I’m really trying to say is that if you want more traffic to your website, then this is one system that I’d highly recommend trying out.

You can learn all about Linkvana at www.linksvana.com.

Bonus: To encourage you to give this system a try I’m sweetening the pot a little bit. You see, while this system is highly effective at building links you still need to know how to structure them. That’s why I recorded a short video that gives you several advanced use tips that will help you get the most out of this system.

To get this bonus, you must order at www.linksvana.com then use the contact form on this site to forward your purchase receipt. I’ll then send you the video for you to watch.

Have a great day, and happy link building.

Gary

In an online world where everyone is trying to make money quickly and where everyone wants everything right now without having to work for it, it’s easy to see the appeal of blackhat search engine optimization.

With the relative ease of use (if you have the right tools and knowledge), and the speed at which you can make money, a lot of people have flocked to using blackhat search engine optimization techniques.

I’ll even admit to having ventured over to the “dark side” for a couple years. However, I got out of it once I realized that I wasn’t building anything of value, and that I’d have to continue working hard for a diminishing return.

You see, that’s the problem you face when in the world of blackhat search engine optimization. Like an outlaw, you’re always running from the law – or in this case the Google. There’s just no long term value in the blackhat world.

You’ll spend your time trying to keep the websites you build under the radar. Instead of trying to get listed on the first page of the search engines, you’ll be happy with page two or three because you know that page one would simply bring too much attention to your site.

You’ll actually get nervous if you have a website that gets over 1,000 visitors in a day because you’ll realize that the life cycle of your website is about to end (trust me, it is), and you’ll have to start back at square one as soon as the website gets banned.

Blackhat search engine optimization can even cause problems in your personal life. People will ask you what you do, and you’ll give some vague answer so as not to reveal what you actually do because you’re not proud of it and certainly don’t want people to see examples of you work.

Conversely, when you’re dealing in the world of whitehat search engine optimization you’ll notice that it takes a little longer to get a lot of traffic flowing into your website, but you’re not in constant fear of it disappearing.

If you suddenly start getting thousands of visitors a day, it’ll be cause to throw a party, not panic. You’ll know that the work you’ve put into the site is paying off.

Whitehat search engine optimization is a long term strategy whereas blackhat search engine optimization is absolutely a short term strategy. With whitehat you’re building an asset that you could eventually sell if you chose to, but a blackhat website has almost no value on the market these days – nobody wants to own a website that is in imminent danger of getting banned by the search engines.

Don’t let the dark side tempt you – stick to the light side and you’ll be a lot better off two years down the road than your colleagues that decide to go blackhat.

Want more great tips and strategies for getting traffic to your website? Then be sure to sign up for my printed monthly newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly. You’ll get exclusive content and strategies for getting traffic to your website.

When it comes to hiring someone to create content for your website, it’s important to know what language your writers speak.

First, you’ll want to consider what language is their FIRST language. If it’s not English, and they haven’t spent the last 10 years living in an English speaking country, then they probably aren’t going to be up to snuff for your article writing projects.

I’ve hired a ton of different writers over the past few years to create content for my webistes, and I’ve had to learn this the hard way. I’ve tried to get cheap and take the writer from India over the qualified writer from the U.S. Even in cases where the person from India has a masters degree in English, I’d still have been better off with the native English speaker.

In my experience, even the excellent writers from India still tend to make small mistakes that make it obvious they’re not a native speaker.

And the ones I’ve hired who have masters degrees in English, they use a lot of big words that just aren’t in common use today, and they may have sentences that are grammatically correct, but are very awkward to read.

I seem to have hit a nerve with writers from India who don’t seem to appreciate my take on their writing.

Just recently I had one write the following to me:

“Wish you’d kept off that snide remark about writers from India. You guys will never improve. The white skin reflects your mentality - shallow, pale and totally colorless!”

Obviously this person is ticked off, but I still stand by my original assessment that Indian writers are a major step below American writers. If I wanted content written in Indian, I’m confidant they’d do a good job, however, for content written in English, I’ll stick to my team of American writers despite the extra expense. They can insult me all they want, but as they say, “the proof is in the pudding.”

Having writers whose first language is English is very important, but it’s not the only consideration you need to make.

The next thing you need to know is if your writer knows American English. With apologies to the British, American English is the standard language of the web. Unless you’re serving just one particular country like England or Australia, you’ll want to stick to American spellings, and American slang, otherwise you’ll be turning off a large portion of your reading audience.

So while it may cost a bit more to get a person who grew up and lives in the United States to write your articles, the investment will be well worth it.

If you’re using your articles for article marketing, you’ll get more people republishing the article, and more people clicking through your links which means more people visiting your website.

If using articles as content for your website, you’ll have people spending more time on your site, linking to it, and spending money on your website.

The last point I want to cover is making sure your writers speak the jargon of whatever niche your website is in.

If I said I have an MS63 PCGS certified 1907 High Relief Wire Rim St. Gauden, what did I just say? Unless you collect coins you probably have no idea what the heck I just said. If you collect coins, you probably know I’m talk about a $20 gold coin (that one in particular is worth almost $25,000). The point I’m trying to make is that when you hire someone to write articles for you, make sure they’re familiar with the lingo in that area. If they’re not, your visitor will be able to spot that quickly, and you’ll end up losing credibility.

Follow these guidelines for your articles and you’ll find that increasing traffic and revenue to your website is a whole lot easier than when you try to use 3rd rate writing services just to save a couple bucks.

If you found this article valuable, you’ll get articles just like these and a whole lot more when you sign up for my traffic generation newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly. It’s a printed newsletter that will be shipped to your home or office every month.

I study traffic generation. I really do. I spend thousands of dollars each year buying products that promise to help me get an edge in the traffic generation market hoping that I might learn just some small twist I didn’t know before. I read tons of blogs every month looking for the latest in what’s working, and I read several monthly newsletters that all talk about traffic generation. Heck, I even write one myself.

If you’d have asked me a month ago if I knew of all the major strategies to get traffic to a website, I would have opened up a gigantic mindmap stored on my computer that includes everything from SEO to Social Media to PPC to Radio to JVs to Video to Postcards to Writing Books. It’s huge. Writing a manual on the full gambit of those strategies would be likely result in 50 lbs of manuals.

I’d have probably acknowledged some minor ones I didn’t know about, but I would be pretty sure I knew all the strategies for getting A LOT of traffic to a website.

Well, I was wrong.

I recently purchased a product – it was cheap so I thought what the heck – that taught me about a major source of traffic that I’d completely missed.

In my huge stack of manuals, newsletters, and audio programs nobody had ever talked about it. Not one single mention.

And this isn’t just a few visitors a day type of traffic or even a few hundred. This method can result in thousands of extra visitors per day. It’s a resource that has been overlooked by most marketers for years, and the select few that know about are making a killing from it.

Would you like to know what it is?

Software.

By creating freeware/shareware programs and distributing them to the major software directories, you can get thousands or even tens of thousands is extra visitors a day to visit a website, sign up to a newsletter, or even go to an affiliate page of yours.

In the manual, Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate, the author Chris Rempel covers how to use this strategy in detail, and how to create program even if you couldn’t program your way out of a box. I’m not a programmer either, and I can do this.

This software strategy isn’t all he covers either. He actually talks about how to build traffic to affiliate sites using good old fashioned SEO. And the best part is that he actually knows what he’s talking about.

It’s the first affiliate manual I’ve ever read where the author truly understood search engine optimization and how to build real traffic from the search engines. And he took that understanding and has used it to generate a healthy six figure income with a relatively small number of websites. It’s definitely a worthwhile read.

And if you’ve been reading this blog for a while or you’ve read my Ultimate Traffic Blueprint or taken my link building course, you’ll find that my strategies are completely compatible with his.

And the product is under priced, so even if you’re on a tight budget, there’s no excuse.

If you’re looking for a fairly easy way to make some extra money this year, then I’d highly recommend giving this system a shot.

Click Here To Learn More About Confessions Of A Lazy Super-Affiliate

Have you been wondering if Jonathan Leger’s 3 Way Link Building system is actually worth the investment?

3WayLinks.net Homepage

I have to admit that when I first heard about this system I was extremely skeptical. I was visiting one of my favorite Internet Marketing forums when I heard someone touting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

They said that it was “the real deal.” Also, they posted that, “in just 3 weeks I hit #1 on Google for my main keyword.”

Unconvinced – here’s what I said in regard to this 3 way linking “scheme.”

“Have you tested three way links versus regular reciprocal links?

Google can easily detect 3 way link networks, and treats them the same as reciprocal links. I’m not saying that there’s not any benefit to using them, obviously they’re working for you, just keep in mind that by using a 3 way exchange, you’re not doing something Google hasn’t already thought of.”

After a few exchanges back and forth I decided to give it a try. I’m a pragmatic guy. I care about results, not theory, so I thought I’d give it a try on a few sites I didn’t care all that much about.

I was a little concerned that this would be like other massive link exchanges where it’d work great for Yahoo and MSN, but that it would result in my site getting penalized in Google.

The system allows you to put up to 50 domains in their network for your monthly fee. I only added 3 websites. I then promptly forgot about it and went on my life.

Less than a month later, the traffic to one of the sites I had added had tripled!

Still, unconvinced I wasn’t ready to endorse the product. After all, that site was in position to see a massive traffic increase any day in the first place.

So I continued to ignore 3waylinks.net.

Before I continue with my story, I need to explain the keyword selection process so you understand why I was starting to get excited. When you use 3waylinks.net, you get to choose three keywords that will be used for the anchor text pointing to your site. The primary keyword you select will be used 60% of the time, the secondary keyword will be used 30% of the time, and the tertiary keyword will be used 10% of the time.

Okay, back to the story…

Then about 2 ½ months later I was looking at the traffic stats for the second site I had added to the network. It was a network marketing related website, and I had been targeting the term “mlm training” with my main keyword. I noticed that my traffic had jumped significantly for that term; however, it wasn’t the main way people were finding my website.

No, the top traffic generating keyword to my website was the term “network marketing.” This website wasn’t optimized for the term in any way, shape, or form. I had deemed that word too difficult to get top ten rankings for. However, I had used the keyword “network marketing” as my secondary keyword in the 3waylinks.net system. When I investigated where the traffic was coming from, it was all from Google. I had reached the top 30 of Google for the term “network marketing” without even trying.

A couple months later I broke into the top 10 of Google for the term mlm training, and that term then became my top traffic keyword. The site also achieved top 2 rankings in both Yahoo and MSN for “mlm training”.

At this point I checked out how the third site I had entered into the system. And you can probably guess what I’m going to say – yep – top ten rankings in Google for that site as well.

During this test I hadn’t been doing any other link building to these sites since I wanted to know if 3 Way Links was actually making the difference.

I am comfortable saying that, yes, 3 Way Links works, and it works extremely well. I am extremely comfortable recommending this to my loyal readers as a system that will help you get top ten rankings not just in Yahoo and MSN (as I originally suspected) but in Google as well.

And trust me, a top ten Google ranking is worth a heck of a lot more than a top ten in Yahoo or MSN because it drives so much more traffic to your website.

Now before you got off joining and expecting massive amounts of traffic, there are a few things you should know:

1) This is still a link exchange. Yes, it works substantially better than regular reciprocal link exchanges but at the end of the day, it’s still a link exchange system. However, Google is no longer as strongly against reciprocal link exchanges. According to their own Webmaster guidelines they now state you shouldn’t have “excessive reciprocal links.” What constitutes excessive is not known, but the 250 links that 3 Way Links builds to your site would seem to be under their limit.

2) You still need other links. You shouldn’t use 3 Way Links as the only links to your website. I think it’s dangerous to rely on just one link building method for your search engine rankings. Currently, you can rank well by just using this system, but if you use it in conjunction with other systems, you’ll see even better results.

3) Not useful for increasing Pagerank. If you’re obsessed with Pagerank then don’t bother with this system. I haven’t seen my Pagerank increase on any site by using this system. What I have seen is a dramatic increase in my search engine rankings and the traffic to my website. Google has made Pagerank a fairly irrelevant statistic over the past year so don’t get too hung up on it.

4) Some knowledge of how to build a website required. If you have absolutely no idea how to build a web page, then using this system is going to be difficult for you. There are some tutorials available for you, and a forum, but if you’re not comfortable with html then be prepared for a bit of a learning curve. You’ll need create a new web page for your site and paste in some php code to make this system work. If you can’t do that, you’ll need to hire someone to do that for you.

5) Selecting keywords. There’s a trick to making this system work that really isn’t covered by tutorials on the website. Your websites will appear in a 6-3-1 ratio. That means for every 10 links that are built to your website, 6 will include your primary keyword, 3 will include your secondary keyword, and 1 will include your tertiary keyword. To maximize the effectiveness of this system, your secondary keyword should be related to your website’s content, but it shouldn’t include any of the anchor text of your primary keyword. For example, 1-mlm training, 2-network marketing, 3-multi level marketing tips would be a good use of keywords. However, 1-mlm, 2-mlm training, 3-mlm help would be unwise since all of your keywords include the anchor text “mlm.” That looks highly unnatural to the search engines and it’s unlikely that you’ll rank as well if you do that.

So that’s my review. If you’re looking to get more traffic to your website, then I am willing to say that this is one of the easiest ways I’ve found to do it, and I fully recommend 3WayLinks.net to you.

Click Here To Learn More About 3WayLinks.net

A lot of website owners are content to buy PPC ads, run affiliate programs, and buy banners ads as their sole forms of advertising. They completely shun search engine optimization because they think that it’s too hard to keep up with and that the returns aren’t predictable.

There’s a major flaw in that style of thinking. They’re missing out on large portion of potential customers by not being highly visible in the organic search engine listings.

I have a friend who is very Internet savvy – he uses Google everyday, he buys a lot of items online, but he doesn’t respond well to advertising, especially PPC advertising. He’s never clicked on a pay per click ad in his life. He’s highly skeptical of marketing, and will ignore it.

While he’s probably the exception rather than the rule, there are a certain percentage of people who will ignore the ads no matter how good your ad copy is. You may be thinking that these people make bad customers anyway, but if we use my friend as an example, you’d be wrong. He’s always buying himself new gadgets and “toys.”

However, reaching him as a customer is a lot trickier because traditional advertising methods simply don’t work very well.

This is where implementing search engine optimization as a strategy comes in. My friend can easily be reached by showing up on the first page of Google for whatever he typed in as long as you’re found in the regular listings, but if you’re not easy to find in the regular listings, you’re not going to get his business.

So what’s a business to do? While the finer details of search engine optimization could easily exceed 1000 pages, there are two basic things you need to rank well in the search engines…

1) Content and 2) Links.

You need enough content (articles, videos, pics, etc) on your website to thoroughly cover your topic. For example, a site about real estate that only has ten pages is woefully inadequate, but those ten pages would likely able to cover how to care for a golden retriever fairly well.

And once you have the content on your website taken care of, you need to get links to your website. In general, the more links you have, the better rankings you’ll get.

I’m not saying that SEO should be your only strategy for driving traffic to your website, but you should certainly give it a chance, and when you do, you’ll find that it will help you get new customers you weren’t able to get previously.

Want even more strategies for getting high quality traffic to your website? Then sign up for my printed monthly newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly. Every month, I’ll mail you a new issue packed full of strategies to help you get more traffic, and also I’ll talk about how to convert that traffic into customers.

It seems like every few months someone releases a new product promising to reveal the latest search engine loophole to you that will finally show you how you can get the #1 ranking in Google in less than 60 seconds.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, but not that much.

The problem with these people and their products is that even if they did uncover a legitimate loophole, as soon as a lot of people start to take advantage of it and ultimately abuse it, that loophole is slammed shut, and the people who are using that loophole are frequently penalized if not outright banned from the search engines for it.

I have a lot of first hand experience with this. A few years ago, I built websites that really had no value to the people who visited them, but you could trick the search engines into thinking that these were great sites, and the search engines would reward you with high search engines and a lot of traffic.

Initially, it worked great, but once the search engines figured out what was going on, they got rid of the little loopholes that people like me were taking advantage of and banned those websites.

I had websites go from getting 5,000+ visitors per day to 50.

Trust me, that’s not a good feeling.

These days, however, I do things very differently. I don’t even bother with the latest loophole or blackhat tactic of that day – I follow a strategy that has been working for years, and will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

And it’s a really simple strategy.

I follow basic search engine optimization guidelines, update and add content to my site regularly, and seek out high quality links for my website.

I know it’s not as sexy as pushing buttons and getting a site that gets thousands of visitors a day, but a month later when that site you built with sexy button pushing software is getting absolutely no visitors, my site will be continuing to get more traffic.

Another benefit to building high quality sites that are built to last, and that’s that they’re something you can sell. You see, those crappy sites that try to take advantage of the search engines aren’t worth anything as soon as they stop getting traffic, and it’s not a matter of if they stop getting traffic, it’s a matter of when. On the other hand, if your build a site that people legitimately like to visit, then it’s reasonable to assume that the search engines will like it too and you’ll be rewarded with more traffic which makes your website very attractive to potential buyers.

So stop trying to play tricks on the search engines, in the long run, you’re going to be a lot better off building high quality websites than you would building junk websites.

Want to learn more legitimate and powerful ways to drive traffic to your website? Then be sure to sign up for my monthly traffic generation newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly. Every month, I’ll mail you tips and strategies for generating traffic and converting that traffic into customers.

With so many people touting the virtues of PPC as a way to get people to your website instantly, the benefits of organic search engines rankings can get lost in the shuffle despite the dramatic advantages they offer.

And when I say organic search engine rankings, I’m talking about the non-sponsored results you see on the left hand side of the screen when you do a search in Google, Yahoo, or your favorite search engine.

I want to take a few minutes here to explain why every website needs to be spending at least a little time making sure their website is optimized for the search engines.

If you’re already making all the money you could ever want using Pay Per Click advertising methods, then you can stop reading here, but if you’re not yet enormously wealthy, you may wish to continue.

1) Ad Blindness

First of all, when it comes to Pay Per Click advertising, many savvy Internet users have learned to ignore them – they may show up on the page, but the web user doesn’t even see them. They’re only concerned with those 10 “natural” or “organic” listings – i.e. those search engine listings where the website owner didn’t just offer to pay the most money per click to get on the first page of the search engine listings.

In a recent survey of Internet users, 85% of them said they tend to ignore sponsored listings. That means that if you are using only PPC to generate revenue for your business, you’ll be busy fighting with all the other advertisers for a mere 15% of the market while those who focused on getting high search engine rankings have 100% of market available to them. (Have you ever heard anyone ever say they tend to ignore regular search engine listings and only want to look at ads? Unless you’re a marketer analyzing the competition, probably not!)

2) Organic Listings More Trusted

There’s also a trust factor at work here. People are naturally skeptical of advertisers – it’s just the nature of the beast. In fact, over 90% of Internet users have said that they trust the organic search engine results MORE than they trust sponsored results. As you may be starting to realize you’re facing an uphill battle when a visitor does decide to click on your Pay Per Click ad. Not only are most of users ignoring you, eliminating a big portion of your potential market, most of them are clicking on your ad with a lot of skepticism.

3) Organic Listings Are Free

And if the fact that your message is more trusted and not ignored with natural search engine rankings haven’t convinced you to at least give it a try, then you may want to know that natural search engine rankings are Free! You can’t pay to get a top search engine ranking, and you never have to pay a fee when someone clicks on a link to visit your website.

While not all search engine rankings last, especially if you neglect them, some of them can last indefinitely. I’ve had a website that for the past 3 years has ranked in the top ten for it’s main keyword. I’ve done almost nothing to maintain that ranking, yet that single top ten listing makes me thousands of dollars each month and I don’t spend any money advertising the site. While I’ve had a lot of competitors come and who who’ve tried to make it by doing Pay Per Click, I’ve managed to sell my product at a higher price simply because my website is listed near the top of the natural search engine listings.

And you want to know another valuable part of top ten search engine rankings? While they may not always be easy to get, once you get them they are frequently easy to maintain as long as you have a high quality website. For example, if someone is writing a story on horse racing, and they find your site at number 1, and it provides a lot of useful content on the subject of horse racing, they’re very likely to link to your site as a valuable resource on the subject. That means that with new people linking to you without you even asking for you, you’re that much more likely to maintain your top ten ranking.

If you’re not already taking advantage of natural search engine rankings to drive traffic (and sales!) to your website, then it’s time to get started.

Want more strategies and techniques to help you get more traffic to your website? Then sign for my printed monthly newsletter - Traffic Transformation Monthly. Every month I’ll send you tips and strategies for not only getting more traffic to your website, but also on converting those visitors into customers.