How to build web traffic without turning to the dark side

Source: Vsoftsystems, 09/11/2018

You can buy links and likes, but they won’t do you any favours in the
long-run
Every web startup faces the same challenge: how do you get noticed
amongst all that competition and build traffic? The clever money says
leave all that search engine optimisation (SEO) stuff to the
professionals. Yet money, clever or not, is the one luxury most
startups don`t have. This can often lead to a DIY approach to both SEO
and online marketing, which is no bad thing if done properly.
The temptation to cheat and follow the dark side when building traffic
is strong. Yet, grey- or black-hat SEO, along with social media
follower farming, isn`t the panacea you may have hoped for. So, what`s
the alternative to either investing in SEO expertise or becoming the
Darth Vader of ecommerce? Well, you could ask SEO and digital
marketing experts to pass their knowledge on for free �` which is
precisely what we`ve done.
Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
Let`s start with how not to do things, even if it does look like an
easy and relatively cheap way to build your traffic in no time at all.
Some call it `black hat` SEO, while others try to disguise the
underhand nature by labelling it as `grey hat` instead. Whatever you
call it, if you try to game the system using dodgy techniques, you
will likely end up on the naughty step with Google, Facebook and
Twitter �` plus all the other services that you need to push traffic in
your direction. So how do you know what is an illegitimate marketing
technique to begin with?
Joe Linford is the head of SEO at ISP price comparison site Broadband
Genie, and warns that Google has cracked down on websites `seeking to
gain an advantage in the SERPs [search engine result pages] and will
penalise sites for building unnatural links`.
Links were the lifeblood of the Google algorithm for many years. Who
you link to, and the backlinks your site gets from others, are still
important; but link signals are not the sole determiner of strong SERP
ratings. `Google has moved towards relying more on human opinions such
as search quality raters, Chrome browser activity and Analytics data,`
Linford told PC Pro.
The trouble is that those Google algorithms are impenetrable to mere
mortals. Which is why so many businesses still turn to high volume and
low cost link-acquisition strategies, such as placing links into
generic directories or link networks. These are a group of websites,
more commonly than not owned by the network operator, that generate
huge volumes of what are essentially fake links. They will offer the
unwitting customer a bundle of, say, 250 or 500 new links to their
site for a fee. Trouble is, not only are those links of very low
quality, as they provide nothing of any real value to someone who
clicks on them, but Google has become a Jedi Master at spotting link
networks and blacklisting them. That`s hardly surprising: if there are
no `footprints` linking these disparate sites together, chances are
the network is fake. By buying into such a link-farming network, your
traffic could suffer as Google penalises you for being associated with
a black hat operation.
It`s not only link-farming that will get you into negative equity with
the search supremo either. Jake Ramon-Capon is senior SEO consultant
at Greenlight Digital, a digital marketing agency that counts eBay and
Dixons Carphone (whose brands include PC World and Carphone Warehouse)
among its clients. `Google has a long list of well documented tactics
that could negatively impact your brand,` Ramon-Capon explained,
before pointing in the direction of cloaking. This is where you serve
up different content to search engines than actual users, the former
designed to be uber-SERPs-friendly of course. `Google spots this as
its crawlers parse the source code of the page to find irregularities
in the code that suggest cloaking,` he said, `and then a member of the
web spam team will manually check the affected pages.` If they`re
served up something completely different, the site will be penalised.