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| Why Google traffic and link traffic are the same? |
Why Google traffic and link traffic are the same’.
Read his article before you proceed reading this as ill be talking about what he said.
Ok…you’ve read it haven’t you OK, to summarize, he says that you should build up link traffic from other sources because search engines are unreliable and can change their algorithms. He’s right. Search engines can change the way they work out rankings etc however i wouldn’t go as far as saying they’re unreliable. Far from it. Search engines try and provide the best search results to searchers so as long as your still writing good posts you shouldn’t lose loads of traffic. Have faith in your posts!!
Now i do agree that you should build link traffic however other than DMOZ and a few other directories, submitting your blog to quite a lot of these sites is a waste of time.
Leeroy goes on to say
As we all know, Google loves links – the more, the better. In addition to all that link traffic that you just worked so hard to build, Google is likely to rank your sites higher, and send you more traffic.
So in the process of building up your link traffic, you also built up your Google traffic – not a bad deal is it? So while Google traffic and link traffic aren’t technically the same ( perhaps I picked a bad title for this post ) , they absolutely go hand in hand – it’s hard to work on one without affecting the other.
Well actually no. Google isn’t likely to rank your site any higher if you get links on blog directories or link farms. Most of these pages have a page rank of 2 or 3. You will get much better results from google if you write 3 or 4 good articles as google will have lots of keywords and search terms to crawl about in. And thats what spiders love!
I agree that the title of his post is a little misleading and Leeroy makes some very good points. However, i have to disagree that traffic from link directories and from search engines are the same. 100 visits might look the same on a stats page but in general, links from top sites, link directories etc are less targeted than ones from search engines.
Someone who is browsing a blog directory is more inclined to click on dozens of sites, read an article or two and then close the window and browse another site. Someone from a search engine is more likely to read more posts or even comment as they came to your site to a page which was relevant to them.
Take someone who is struggling with HTML. They are trying to understand contact forms. If they found a web design blog who explains forms in detail then they will be overjoyed (perhaps a sligh exaggeration). Now i know that some traffic from directories is targeted and i know that not everyone who finds a blog through a search engine finds what they’re looking for. However, the chances of the traffic being targeted from a search engine is much greater because they found your site by searching for a keyword or search term and your page had that search term.
What is Targeted Traffic?
Targeted traffic is usually discussed more on affiliate and shopping sites than on blogs but i do think it’s still relevant.
Take a shopping site which sells custom soccer t-shirts. The webmaster could advertise on a flash arcade site and get 5000 visits in the one day. He could also advertise on a soccer blog but only get 400 visits. Which site do you think make him the most money? It’s clear the t-shirt site would benefit more from traffic from a site related to his. It’s unlikely many of the 500 visitors from the arcade site were interested in a soccer shirt.
This whole concept is applicable to blogs. Say i was out tomorrow and took a picture of something funny i saw outside. I post it on my blog and before i know it i’ve had thousands of links from sites posting links to the picture. What has my site gained? Well, nothing really. Very few of those are interested in anything other than the picture. All i have done is increase my hosting bandwidth for the month!
This is the whole premise of ‘Targeted Traffic’. Traffic isn’t the same. 50 visits to your blog from people who contribute and read what you say is better than 500 visits from people who just kinda found it by accident and then left.
Going back to Leeroy’s article, Leeroy brings up some important points about trying to give your site exposure on other websites to get traffic. Just remember however that search engine traffic is generally more targeted than directories etc because people have been using search terms to find the page on your site. All traffic is not the same.
